Washington's career standard, criterion by criterion: 3 of 21 matched, 18 not claimed.

Washington compels a middle-grades career plan by law. Compelled, and compelled with unusual force: subsection (1) reads "Each student must have a high school and beyond plan to guide the student's high school experience and inform course taking that is aligned with the student's goals for education or training and career after high school." Not "may", not "is encouraged to" — every student, no exceptions in the section. The middle-school half is subsection (2)(a): "By grade seven, each student must be administered a career interest and skills inventory which is intended to be used to inform grade eight course taking and development of an initial high school and beyond plan. No later than grade eight, each student must have begun development of a high school and beyond plan that includes a proposed plan for first-year high school courses aligned with graduation requirements and secondary and postsecondary goals." That first sentence is the only place in any statute on this list that names our product category as a thing a district must administer by a specific grade. One counterweight a buyer should know about, because it is the difference between a mandate and a checklist an auditor holds: subsection (7) leaves the verdict local — "Any decision on whether a student has met the state board of education's requirements for a high school and beyond plan shall remain at the local level, and a school district may establish additional, local requirements for a high school and beyond plan to serve the needs and interests of its students and the purposes of this section." So the duty is statewide and the standard of proof is the district's. Washington also, unlike Pennsylvania, requires no state-level filed artefact for the grade seven inventory; the plan lives with the district.

RCW 28A.230.212 — High school and beyond plans, in the two subsections that reach a middle school: (2), the grade seven and grade eight duties, and (6), the minimum elements every plan must contain., published by Washington State Legislature (Revised Code of Washington, Title 28A — Common School Provisions, chapter 28A.230 RCW), grades 7-12. Washington is the one state on this list with no separate middle-school career standard to table, and the grade band above says 7-12 rather than 6-8 for a reason a district should read before comparing this page with any other. Washington does not publish a set of grade 6-8 career competencies. It publishes one document that every student must have — the high school and beyond plan — and it starts that document in the middle school: a career interest and skills inventory by grade seven, and the plan itself begun no later than grade eight. So the honest object to crosswalk is the plan, and the plan runs to grade 12. We table two of the statute's eight subsections. Subsection (2) is the grade seven and eight trigger. Subsection (6) is the state's own enumerated list of what every plan must contain, introduced with "All high school and beyond plans must, at a minimum, include the following elements". Twenty-one criteria in total. What we deliberately do not table is subsections (3), (4) and (5), and the boundary is the state's own rather than one we drew: (6) says what a plan must CONTAIN, while (3), (4) and (5) say who updates it, when, in what language, and with which community partners. Those are process duties on a district — annual updates with staff support, parent involvement, language access under chapter 28A.183 RCW, IEP alignment — and none of them is an element of the document. Adding them would have added eight more rows we cannot claim, which would have made our ratio on this page look worse rather than better, so their absence is not us protecting a number. Two groups, both the statute's own subsections. "28A.230.212(2)" holds the two lettered paragraphs of the grade seven and eight subsection. "28A.230.212(6)" holds the minimum plan elements, and there the statute nests three levels deep, so a word about how we flattened it. Subsection (6) has five lettered elements, (a) through (e). Two of them are chapeau sentences whose actual content is a numbered list underneath: (c) "An academic plan for course taking that:" carries eight roman-numeral sub-items, and (d) "A postsecondary financial aid application element that includes:" carries four, the last of which carries five lettered sub-sub-items of its own. We table the operative sub-items and not the chapeaux, because a chapeau is a sentence fragment and a row that reads "An academic plan for course taking that:" tells a reviewer nothing. Each sub-item's row text therefore opens with its chapeau so the row is readable standing alone. That gives 1 + 1 + 8 + 8 + 1 = 19 rows for subsection (6), plus 2 for subsection (2), for 21. We resisted the alternative of collapsing the five financial-aid sub-sub-items into their parent paragraph: all five are criteria we do not claim, and merging them would have quietly shrunk the denominator in our favour by four rows.

It means the platform itself produces the artefact the criterion asks for, with nothing a teacher has to add. 1 criterion of the 21 are closed this way: RCW 28A.230.212(6)(a). Each of those rows names the surface and the artefact, and several carry a coverage caveat — how many careers actually hold the field being claimed — because a reviewer will check.

It means the platform supplies the data or the assessment result and a teacher runs the classroom half — it is weaker, and it is labelled separately for that reason. 2 criteria are closed this way: RCW 28A.230.212(2)(a) and RCW 28A.230.212(6)(b). A plan a system wrote for the student would not satisfy the standard, and claiming it would not be worth much either.

Because the 1 and the 2 are different kinds of evidence — one is work the software does on its own, the other is work a teacher does with something the software supplies — and merging them into one headline number would flatter the platform at your expense. Every row states which of the two it is, and the counts are shown as separate pills rather than added together.

We make no claim on them. No JobCannon surface — assessment, career-page field or glossary entry — addresses them, and they are listed exactly as plainly as the 3 we do claim: same row format, same visual weight, a stated "not claimed" rather than an absence.

Every code in this column is Washington's own and can be quoted back to the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction or to a legislator exactly as printed here — "RCW 28A.230.212(6)(d)(iv)(C)" is a real citation that resolves to the text in that row. Nothing in this column is ours. The one presentational liberty is that we print the section number on every row rather than only in the group heading, so that a row copied out of this page on its own is still a complete citation.

Read 2026-09-06 from the Legislature's own RCW publication. The section's history line reads "[ 2026 c 147 s 2; 2026 c 122 s 2; 2024 c 66 s 7; 2023 c 271 s 3.]" — so the text tabled here is current through the 2026 session. One thing anyone re-checking should know, because it is printed on the source and would otherwise look like an error: the Reviser's note states that "This section was amended by 2026 c 122 s 2 and by 2026 c 147 s 2, each without reference to the other. Both amendments are incorporated in the publication of this section under RCW 1.12.025(2)." Two 2026 acts amended the same section independently and the published text merges them. One element carries its own future date: the review requirement inside (6)(d)(iv)(A) begins with the 2027-28 school year, and we have quoted it as printed rather than dropping it. The document itself is linked at the top of the table, so you can check any row against the source rather than take our word for it.