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Lincoln High School

Seattle Public Schools · High · grades 9-12 · 4400 Interlake Ave N, Seattle, WA 98103-7519

Location

4400 Interlake Ave N, Seattle, WA 98103-7519

Academic snapshot

Meeting standard, latest year
77.5%
SBAC ELA+Math combined, 2024-25
Meeting standard, 3-year
77.9%
#8 of 173 high schools region-wide · #1 of 15 in this district
Exceeding standard, latest year
57.2%
SBAC Level 4, the top score band
Exceeding standard, 3-year
55.2%
#9 of 173 high schools region-wide · #1 of 15 in this district
3-year trend

Student outcomes

Graduating in 4 years
95.9%
Of the entering 9th-grade class
9th graders on track
94.9%
Earned all attempted credits
College-level coursework
72.3%
AP / IB / Running Start / CTE
Regular attendance
77.4%
Missing fewer than 2 days/month

Directly from OSPI Report Card (graduation, postsecondary via ERDC, ninth-grade on track, dual credit, growth, attendance). Latest published year.

Who attends

Students from low-income homes
11.6%
English language learners
2.6%
Highly Capable program
40.6%
Enrollment
1,780
Kids per typical block
Density band: unknown

Teachers

Teachers (latest)
83
Avg years experience
9.1
MA-degree share
83.1%
3-year experience trend

Avg years and MA-degree share are direct OSPI publications; the 3-year trend is our derivation. From data.wa.gov/yp28-ks6d.

Nearby schools

We haven't mapped this district's official feeder chart yet, so these are the closest schools of the next level by straight-line distance, not your assigned or guaranteed schools. Your address decides the assignment. See the districts with full pathways mapped.

Nearest middle schools by distance
Nearest Highly Capable cohort

Competition and advanced-peer evidence

Aggregated from WHSCA, Washington Science Olympiad, The Blue Alliance, and the Seattle Times National Merit list. "Known counts" only, missing public evidence is not proof of absence.

Highly Capable / gifted pathway

Curated from district Highly Capable program pages, with observed-at dates and confidence labels.

Research dossier

Lincoln High School

Seattle Public Schools · grades 9–12 · 1,780 students · attendance-area high school in Wallingford, and the endpoint of the district's dual-language immersion pathway

The verdict

Seattle parents tend to talk about Lincoln as the district's new flagship, the 1907 building that reopened in 2019 and immediately started posting numbers rivaling anything in the city. The data mostly backs the chatter, but the mechanism matters. Lincoln's boundary happens to capture the highest concentration of Highly Capable students of any Seattle Public Schools comprehensive high school: 40.6% of the student body carries the designation (state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) data, 2024-25). Advanced pacing is therefore the building's default setting rather than a program you sign up for. The results include 13 National Merit Semifinalists in 2026, a 95.9% four-year graduation rate, and top-decile English language arts outcomes against demographically similar schools.

The fine print cuts two directions. Lincoln's own climate survey shows its highest-achieving students are the _least_ satisfied with college-readiness support, a hint that counseling capacity hasn't scaled to the cohort's ambitions, and the student newspaper describes the grade culture in bluntly critical terms. A family whose child would arrive outside the Highly Capable pipeline should weigh a different question: whether a school where four in ten peers are formally identified as advanced feels like a rising tide or a treadmill.

Researched 2026-06-27. Citations and claim ledger included in the full dossier.

That is the free excerpt. The full dossier is the rest of the file: how these outcomes hold up in context, how deep the advanced-peer group actually runs, how families get in (and who doesn't), culture signals from handbooks and climate surveys, logistics, neighborhood context, the open questions to ask on your tour, and every citation, so you can check our work. Unlock it for $9, or get a $29 Research Pass with 3 dossiers included.

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Sources

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