Even as we leave memories of the COVID-19 pandemic behind, those years of disruption to in-person education are still having an impact on students in the U.S.
According to a new report from the GRAD Partnership – a group of organizations that works with school districts – most states saw a decline in high school graduation rates from 2019 to 2022. However, national graduation rates were “marginally higher.”
GRAD said that the report is the first in-depth analysis of the pandemic’s impact on high school graduation rates across the country, including state and district-level data. It covered chronic absenteeism, achievement metrics and high school graduation rates as well as postsecondary enrollment and attainment.
“Trends in attainment outcomes before and after the pandemic were most variable at the district level: less than half of the nation’s districts followed the national pattern of rebounded high school graduation rates by 2022,” said GRAD.
Additionally, certain demographics were apparently impacted differently. For example, the report found that students with disabilities experienced the largest gains in graduation rates between 2019 and 2022, while American Indian and Alaska Native students were the only student group with a lower national graduation rate in 2022 than in 2019. Analysis also revealed that students who were in 6th and 7th grade when the pandemic hit suffered some of the most significant educational setbacks.
Before the pandemic, high school graduation rates in the U.S. had been rising. In 2001, they were at 72% and by 2019 they were at 86%. This period of growth followed decades of stagnation and was fueled by gains in historically underserved communities, including Black students, Latino students, low-income students and students with disabilities.
This was in part due to efforts to increase graduation rates as other countries pulled ahead of the U.S., GRAD explained.
“By the 21st century, it became widely understood that a more educated population resulted in better economic, social, and health outcomes,” as it had for most of the 20th century, GRAD said. “Recognition of this, combined with the realization that the 21st century’s good jobs— ones that provide access to a middle-class life—increasingly required more than a high school education, propelled action.”
With the pandemic, lockdown orders to prevent the spread of the virus prevented most students from attending in-person school. Teachers who had not taught online classes before had to quickly pivot, and both students and staff were impacted by the illness itself. COVID-19 also brought the first decline in national high school graduation rates since 2005 in 2021, along with a decline in recent high school graduates enrolling in college.
Rates have started to rebound – on-time graduation reached a high of 86.6% in 2022 – but that doesn’t mean that things are returning to “normal,” GRAD warned. High school chronic absenteeism rates have hit 40% or more in many areas, for example. Costs to attend college have also become prohibitive to those seeking postsecondary education.
State-level statistics also show stress points. GRAD said that the number of states with graduation rates higher than 90% slipped from 10 to five from 2020 to 2022. According to GRAD’s findings based on “adjusted cohort graduation rate,” West Virginia, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Kentucky and Massachusetts were the states with graduation rates above 90%. States and territories with the lowest graduation rates at the end of the 2021-2022 school year were Washington D.C., Arizona, Alaska, Idaho and Michigan and states that saw a decrease compared to 2011 were North Dakota, Vermont, South Dakota, Oklahoma and Arizona. Nationwide, the 2021 to 2022 rebound was driven substantially by California and New York.
“The story of the influences of the pandemic on U.S. high school graduation rates is substantially more complicated than it seems at first glance,” said GRAD. “Although the aggregate U.S. high school graduation rates showed relatively small fluctuations – first up, then down for the first time since states began measuring graduation rates using the adjusted cohort graduation rate, then up again to a new record high – the more closely we looked at high school graduation rate trajectories, the more complicated the picture became.”
Going forward, more research is needed to explore the full impact of the pandemic on education, the report concluded.
“We are only just beginning to see the impacts of the pandemic on high school attainment,” GRAD said.
At the same time, the U.S. education system faces other challenges too. These include increasing rates of children entering kindergarten unvaccinated, the issue of cell phone use in schools as people of all ages become more entwined with their digital lives, stress on educators, violence such as mass shootings at schools, youth mental health concerns and potential changes to the Department of Education with the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump.