Washington K-12 spending and outcomes: per-pupil spending, Kids Count rank, NAEP math
Three small tables for checking claims about Washington's school spending and results: FY2024 per-pupil current spending for all 50 states and DC (Census Bureau), Washington's Annie E. Casey Kids Count education-domain rank for the Data Book years we could verify, and Washington and national-public NAEP grade 8 math average scores for the years printed in NCES state snapshot reports.
Coverage: Per-pupil spending: fiscal year 2024. Kids Count education rank: 2015, 2024, 2025 and 2026 Data Books. NAEP grade 8 math: 2003, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2022 and 2024.
Assembled to test a widely shared October 2026 claim that Washington has the 17th-highest cost per pupil, for 31st-place results, after ranking 20th a decade ago. Each table matches one number in that claim, and the NAEP table adds the nationally comparable test the claim's ranking only partly reflects.
Geography
Washington, United States
Unit of observation
State-year (spending and NAEP); Data Book edition (Kids Count rank).
Update cadence
Ad hoc; Census publishes school finance data annually, Kids Count each June, NAEP every two years.
Curator
FactHub
Curated data tables
These related tables form this versioned dataset release. Each
table has its own downloadable file and field definitions.
Per-pupil current spending by state, FY2024
Census Bureau current spending per pupil for public elementary-secondary school systems, fiscal year 2024.
Rank among the 50 states, 1 = highest spending. Blank for DC.
—
derived
national_average_usd
integer
National current spending per pupil, FY2024.
USD per pupil
observed
Washington Kids Count education rank
Washington's rank among 50 states in the Annie E. Casey Foundation Kids Count education domain, which combines four indicators: young children not in school, fourth graders not proficient in reading, eighth graders not proficient in math, and high school students not graduating on time.
The education domain includes preschool enrollment and on-time graduation as well as test proficiency.
Values come from news reports of the Data Book, not directly from the Kids Count Data Center.
NAEP grade 8 math: Washington vs. nation
Question: How have Washington's grade 8 math scores moved relative to the nation?
Result: Washington's grade 8 math average peaked at 290 in 2013 and fell to 274 in 2024, below its 2003 score of 281; it remains 2 points above the national public average of 272.
Operation: List average scale scores by year and series.
Scope: Grade 8 public school students; years printed in NCES state snapshots
Manually transcribed: Values were transcribed from published PDFs and articles listed in sources; no code transforms the numbers other than sorting and ranking the 50 state spending values. Census's state API now requires a key and its summary workbook could not be parsed in our environment, so the state-by-state pairing was taken from a published ranked list and every value was checked against the Census FY2024 per-pupil chart.
Per-pupil spending is Census 'current spending' (operations), excluding capital outlay and debt service, and is not adjusted for inflation or regional cost differences.
The Kids Count education rank series has gaps (2016-2023 Data Books were not verified) because the Kids Count Data Center could not be retrieved; values for 2024-2026 come from news summaries of the Data Book, not the Data Center itself.
Kids Count Data Book years are publication years; the underlying indicator data are one to two years older.
NAEP national values for 2013 were not printed in the snapshot reports we retrieved and are left missing rather than filled from memory.
NAEP average scores have sampling error; differences of a few points may not be statistically significant. NCES flags 2003 values as significantly different from 2024.
per_pupil_fy2024.csv
text/csv · 1.6 KB (1,645 bytes)