Last year, an eighth-grader at Garry Middle School sat in principal Adam Oakley’s office and said he wanted to change. He’d spent the last couple of years grappling with chronic absences and behavioral issues, but he didn’t want to be “the bad kid” anymore, he told Oakley.
He meant it. Over the course of the school year, he became a team leader in sports. He didn’t have a single behavioral incident. The student had a “phenomenal” year, Oakley said.
Then came the Smarter Balanced Assessment (SBA) — one of the state’s primary tools, along with the Washington Comprehensive Assessment of Science (WCAS), for measuring whether students are meeting grade-level standards. The Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) released the latest round of school-by-school results last week, offering a look at how Spokane-area students performed during the 2025-26 school year.
After the SBA, the student came up to Oakley and asked how he had done. Oakley didn’t know yet. Results for individual students, schools, districts and the state are released by September, according to the OSPI’s website, but schools can see student scores sooner.
When Oakley received student scores, he realized the student had tested at Level 1, the lowest of four proficiency levels. But the student had grown about 240 points since his last assessment — one of the largest improvements Oakley had seen. The SBA is scored on a continuous scale from approximately 2,000 to 3,000 points, increasing by grade level.
The student was devastated regardless, Oakley said.
“We had to stop and show him: ‘Look at where you were in third, fourth, fifth, sixth. Look at where you are now,’” Oakley said. “What I’m nervous (about is) that score gets mailed home and there’s no understanding of that growth.”
Beneath the numbers
Washington’s state assessments sort student performance into four levels: Levels 1 and 2 mean that they did not meet grade-level expectations, while Levels 3 and 4 mean that they met or exceeded expectations. For this analysis, Level 3 and 4 count as proficient or on-grade level.
Garry lies within a school district that has trailed both Spokane County and the state on every subject tested, every year, for at least the last five years.
The Spokane School District at large scored more than four percentage points below the state average in English Language Arts (ELA) and more than three points below in math and nearly three points below in science.
Caption: See where each Spokane County school district ranks by clicking the dropdown.
Overall, the number of students scoring at Level 3 or Level 4 proficiency for English has dropped slightly since 2021 from about 50% to about 47%. Meanwhile, roughly six in 10 students district-wide has tested below grade level in math each year since 2021
Caption: See where each Spokane School District school ranks by clicking the dropdown.
By the state’s measures, the numbers for Garry are stark.
Across the district, low-income students trail the overall student population by 13 to 14 percentage points, students with disabilities by 24 to 30 points, and English language learners by 27 to 40 points, depending on the subject.
Caption: See details about each Spokane School District school by clicking the dropdown.
Garry serves a high-need population in the Northtown Mall area. As of last school year, more than 80% of Gary’s 430 students are low-income. Nearly 19% are English language learners, and more than a quarter are students with disabilities.
In the 2025-26 school year, just 26%of Garry students who tested scored at grade level in ELA, and 21% of students scored at grade level in math. Just four out of 65 English language learner students tested at grade level proficiency for math.
“When the state comes out with this number and it’s widely reported, ‘X number of kids met standard in Spokane Public Schools in math,’ that is such a small piece of the story that it can be frustrating,” Oakley said.
The growth factor
For some educators, the state assessments fail to capture a student’s real progress, even if they are below grade level.
“On paper, state report — yes, he’s nowhere near eighth grade standard,” Oakley said of last year’s student. “But man, that trajectory changed. And that’s such a part of the story.”
Melissa Fredekind, a math teacher at Garry Middle School, said she doesn’t see state test scores until her students are already in their freshman year of high school. These scores also don’t provide much for teachers to understand their students’ grasp on the material they’re learning, according to Fredekind.
“There’s nothing I can do with it in the moment. I can just kind of see a trajectory of what it looks like, and then hope that they can make some growth on that number by the time they leave my classroom,” she said.
Garry — like some other schools — uses a different tool to try and measure progress during the year: Measures of Academic Progress testing (MAP), given three times a year in fall, winter and after spring break.
Unlike the state assessment, MAP scores are available almost immediately.
“We can see the data of what kind of questions they're doing and get the placement correctly right away. The state testing doesn't provide me that opportunity,” Fredekind said.
Students don’t react the same way when the score is disconnected from a student’s more incremental progress, according to Oakley.
“When you walk through hallways and have sixth, seventh and eight graders walk up to you and say, ‘Mr. Oakley, I went up four points’ — they’re excited about assessment,” Oakley said. “So we’re pro-accountability. We’re pro-assessment.”
But even with testing options, Garry’s teachers — and educators across the district — face other problems.
Fredekind said she teaches classes of about 30 students, which makes it difficult to “touch base with everybody.” Large class sizes compound with other issues too. For example, chronic absenteeism — missing 10% or more of school days — affected more than 30% of Garry’s students last year. Oakley said he’s personally bought students alarm clocks to help get them to school.
“You're constantly playing catch up, and you're constantly trying to identify: ‘How can I pull this group of students to catch them up while not dragging the rest of them back?’” Oakley said of absent students.
He wants growth to be more of a factor in how schools and students are judged.
When just 30% of students are proficient coming in, and the school expects that they make at least one year’s growth, Oakley said that he shoots for ending the year at 30% proficiency as well.
Spokane Public Schools superintendent Adam Swinyard said there are some schools where every student comes in at grade level proficiency, he said, but there are also high poverty neighborhoods where just a small percentage of students are kindergarten-ready.
If every child starts behind, measuring by proficiency fails to tell the real story, Swinyard said.
“That’s not fair to our teachers. It’s not fair to our kids,” Swinyard said. “If they’re growing more than a year’s growth, they certainly are not failing as students, and we shouldn’t be telling their families that their kids and their teachers aren’t doing well.”
