Todd Myers says it is particularly suspicious, coming just weeks after WPC highlighted the lack of data

Todd Myers
Washington Policy Center

Are Washington state students on track to meet the state’s own goals for achievement and graduation? It is impossible to tell because Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI) Chris Reykdal scrubbed the web page of the data after we requested updated information.

It is another remarkable example of Washington state elected officials hiding data when they are failing Washington’s children.

For more than a decade, national test scores for Washington’s students have declined significantly. Between 2013 and 2024, fourth grade students in Washington fell from a ranking of 10^th in the nation in Math to 27^th.  During that same period, fourth grade students in Washington fell from 14^th to 18^th in the nation.

Meanwhile, Mississippi’s students passed Washington students in both reading and math, despite ranking last in math and second to last in reading in 2013.

Presented with that information, SPI Chris Reykdal contends the data are misleading or incomplete. Instead, he points to the state’s own report card for the state to meet the state’s targets. That page included data measuring the state’s progress toward meeting targets for 2027 in graduation, assessments and “English Learner Progress.”

Notably, however, that page indicated that the most recent data for those targets was from the “2018-19 school year.” To determine if they had simply failed to update the page or if there were truly no more recent data, I emailed staff from the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) asking “Are there more recent data?”

They responded that they did, in fact, have more recent data for both the state and school districts. They did not update the state targets after my question, so I asked if the data in the individual report cards were the same as used to determine whether we are meeting state targets. OSPI staff responded, “I need a bit more information on this before I can respond to you. Please expect more detail from me this week.” When I heard nothing, I checked back asking if there was an update.

Then, in early September the OSPI simply removed the page with the state targets. Rather than updating the page showing whether we are on track to meet the targets, the page simply disappeared. Nowhere on the report card page does it make any reference to the 2027 targets or any other targets.

What is now available is simply the data without context. So, for 2024-25, the report card notes that 70.9% of students achieve “Levels 2,3, and 4” in English Language Arts. This would be well below the previously stated goal of “getting each student group to 90% proficiency in English language arts…” as was stated on the now-removed State Targets web page.

The same is true for math, where only 63.3% are achieving at Level 2, 3, or 4.

Are these numbers good? Are they meeting our expectations? Importantly, if they are not, how are we going to improve the results?

Scrubbing the web page of the targets makes it more difficult to hold politicians accountable for those results. As with Results Washington, when the results were scrubbed from the web page in 2019 before Jay Inslee ran for President, hiding embarrassing results is often the goal of hiding the information from the public.

It is particularly suspicious, coming just weeks after we highlighted the lack of data. And it was done in an intentionally opaque way – removing the data without telling us or explaining why they had removed it.

Over the past decade, Washington has significantly increased funding for schools and according to a study by WalletHub, Washington ranks third in the nation.

Todd Myers is a vice president for research at the Washington Policy Center.