Strapped for cash and facing declining enrollment, Seattle Public Schools is in the process of hammering out a plan to close a number of the city’s schools.
New data shows the picture is looking a lot rosier for Seattle’s private schools.
Census data released this month shows private-school enrollment for Seattle K-12 students hit an all-time high in 2023, estimated at 19,400 students. That represents one-quarter of the city’s total 77,200 K-12 students.
Among the nation’s 50 cities with the largest K-12 enrollment, Seattle ranked No. 2 for the share of kids in private schools last year. San Francisco was No. 1 with around 30% of K-12 students enrolled in private schools. Census data shows that nationally, 12.8% of K-12 students attended private school, so Seattle’s percentage is nearly double the national average.
Seattle has had a relatively high private-school enrollment for many years. The last time I wrote about this topic was in 2020, when the most recent census data available was for 2018. It showed around 15,200 K-12 students, or 21.7%, were enrolled in private schools. That ranked third among the 50 largest cities, behind San Francisco and Milwaukee.
Census data shows through most of the 2010s, a little more than 20% of K-12 students in Seattle attended private school. The high number is likely due to a couple of factors. Seattle, like San Francisco, is an affluent city, and many families have the means to afford private schools. It may also have roots in Seattle’s desegregation busing program of the 1970s and 1980s, which resulted in many families with the means to do so pulling their kids from public schools and switching to private.
The increase in private-school attendance in 2023 may be the result of growing dissatisfaction with the public-school system. When I wrote about this topic in 2020, I quoted emails I had received from readers who had switched their kids to private school out of frustration, even though they would have preferred to support the public education system.
These frustrations seem to have only grown. There are concerns over student safety, particularly after fatal shootings at Ingraham High School in November 2022, near Chief Sealth International High School in January and at Garfield High School in June.
And that’s on top of the prolonged COVID-related school shutdowns. The district also announced plans to phase out its highly capable cohort program because of equity issues, which may have pushed some parents of academically gifted children to seek out private-school alternatives.
With the impending closure of some of the city’s schools, it is possible the share of kids in private schools will only increase.
Interestingly, Seattle has a much higher share of students in private school than most of our “peer” cities, other than San Francisco. In Portland, for example, 14.6% of K-12 students attended private school in 2023. Washington, D.C., (18.3%) and Boston (17.1%) were higher than Portland, but still well below Seattle. Minneapolis (14.4%) and Austin, Texas, (13.1%) had lower percentages than Portland.
You may be surprised to see a poorer city, Milwaukee, ranks No. 3 for K-12 private-school enrollment, at 24.3%. But Milwaukee has a voucher program — the nation’s first, started in 1991 — which grants poorer students taxpayer money for private-school tuition. A number of other large cities are in states with private-school voucher programs, but even so, they rank behind Seattle.
The three lowest percentages of private-school enrollment among the 50 cities were in poorer cities in California and Texas.
It’s certainly not cheap to send a kid to private school in Seattle. According to the website Private School Review, average private-school tuition in Seattle is $20,977 for elementary schools and $23,708 for high schools, higher than the national average.
Private schools typically have some grants or scholarships available to students who couldn’t normally afford the tuition. But by and large, these schools are for families affluent enough to afford them. And when you look at the most recent census income data, it helps explain why the percentage of private-school kids is so high here.
Census data showed in 2023, the median household income for a married couple with kids in Seattle was around $245,000.
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