On a national level, pandemic disruptions didn’t derail a decade of steady progress in graduation rates, but new longitudinal data show that some states have been much slower to rebound—and things might get worse before they get better.
More than 86 percent of the class of 2022 earned a diploma on time, four years after entering high school, according to new data released last week by the GRAD Partnership, an initiative by nine education and research organizations, including the Rural Schools Collaborative and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University School of Education, dedicated to improving graduation rates. That’s 7.6 percentage points higher than when the four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate—a more accurate calculation that better catches dropouts—was first used in 2011, making it the highest national graduation rate on record.
But there are warning signs, too. In 2020, 90 percent of students or higher graduated on time in 10 states; now, that’s the case in only five states, and in four states, graduation rates fall below 80 percent.
Students starting high school also show more signs of struggling academically than they did pre-pandemic. Before 2020, most states showed steady improvement in the share of students starting high school on track to graduate in four years. That has changed. Across the five states that reported 9th grade data during and since the pandemic (Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Oregon, and Washington), all but Illinois show significant drops in the share of freshmen who are on track academically.
Robert Balfanz, who leads the GRAD Partnership and co-directs the Center for the Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins, dug into the data with Education Week. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How has the pandemic affected the national momentum for high school graduation?
For many folks this is ancient history, but before [the No Child Left Behind Act], high schools weren’t held accountable for graduation rates, so it wasn’t a thing they focused on. That switch to accountability took a decade; it wasn’t until the 2008 [Title I] regulations at the very end of the Bush administration, where schools had to use the averaged freshman graduation rate, a common measure, and they had to have more ambitious goals. So real graduation rate accountability hit around 2011, and you could see more steady gains after that.
[The adjusted cohort graduation rate is the share of first-time 9th graders in a given year’s cohort who graduate with a regular diploma within four years, after accounting for students who transfer in or out of the school, emigrate, or die. The averaged freshmen graduation rate, generally reported with the ACGR, uses an average of the number of students in grades 8, 9, and 10 to create an average class size for the grade 9 class, which is then compared to the number of students who graduate four years later.]
Before [the pandemic] there was general progress. Some states had more progress, some backslid a little, but by and large, over that decade pre-pandemic, almost all districts saw improvement.
The first data we got [on post-pandemic graduation rates] were these national data, right? And we’d all seen these big learning losses, these huge spikes in chronic absenteeism, but the grad rates went up a little, then down a little, then up again. It didn’t seem like much happened.
But when we peeled back and looked at the state and local levels, that’s when we saw this much greater variability. Different locales have felt the impacts of the pandemic on their grad rates very differently.
Chronic absenteeism continues to be a real problem across all grades. How do you see it affecting students’ high school trajectories?
That was where all our jaws dropped, when we looked at the number of kids chronically absent, rather than just the rate.
In 2021-22, the first year we came back, there were 5,000 high schools where there were 400 or more chronically absent students. I concluded that for high schools, we had to see [2021-22] as the third year of the pandemic, not the first year of recovery. That just paralyzes a school: How do you respond to 500 kids not being there on a regular basis? It just becomes normative: A number of those schools still have chronic absentee rates of 50 percent or more.
Do you think six-year graduation rates would provide a clearer picture of students’ trajectories for this period than traditional four-year rates?
That’s a fair point: with high rates of chronic absenteeism and the general discombobulation of everybody, if the trends get worse, we definitely should see kids still staying, but just graduating a little later.
But I don’t think many kids hang around for six years [to graduate], because you’re 20 years old by then and it’s harder to be a high school student.
Did the pandemic offer any insights in how to address dropouts?
We had an interesting little test case in the first year of the pandemic, when schools went out in March. Many schools basically said, if you were on track to graduate by March 1, you graduate. Clearly, in the states that have exit exams, that’s a benefit, because ... if you have a C average and you fail the final, you might fail the course.
It was interesting that when we took [exit exams] away, it was particularly the marginalized subgroups—minorities, low-income [students], students with disabilities, English learners—that had the biggest [graduation rate] bump.
You could argue that kids need support to the very end, and it just occurred to me in that we may be taking our eye off the ball by March of senior year. The kids might be more tuned out and the schools just might take their foot off the gas a little. But we need to look at what supports we need for this percentage of kids who make it to March, but then never make it to June.
What do you see as the most important levers for school and district leaders to improve graduation rates?
They have to recognize that post-pandemic, especially for adolescents, they’ve got to make the case for why it’s good to be in school. And it has to be both the learning and the social cohesion type idea. For that to be true, they have to make sure that school is a place where like the kids believe they’re actually learning, and not being told in less direct or engaged ways the stuff they could get online. [Secondary] kids have gotten used to a year or two of training to teach yourself online, right? So in a sense, school has got to be better than that. They’ve got to rebuild relationships with adults and kids, but also show that something meaningful is happening. ... So I do think there is space for the more experiential work-based project-based learning along with an academic core.
