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Educating America
Educating America: Progress and Challenges in Providing All Students with the Education Needed for Adult Success is the first in-depth analysis of the pandemic’s impact on high school graduation rates across the nation, including at the state and district levels.
Documenting the Nation's Efforts to Increase Educational Attainment
To chronicle the nation’s progress in meeting its post-pandemic educational attainment challenge, the GRAD Partnership issues an annual report to the nation. Educating America reports build on and expand the focus of over a decade of Building a Grad Nation reports from the Everyone Graduates Center and Civic. We highlight a series of attainment indicators, including:
- Chronic absenteeism
- Achievement metrics
- High school graduation rates
- Postsecondary enrollment and attainment
These indicators provide a post-pandemic baseline from which future progress and setbacks can be measured.
Educating America reports also include “Lessons from the Field” highlighting current efforts to solve the nation’s educational attainment challenges. This year’s report features insights from four GRAD Partnership’s organizing partners: American Institutes for Research (AIR), BARR Center, National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD), and Rural Schools Collaborative (RSC).
"The data we’ve collected sheds much-needed light on the pandemic’s deep and varied effects on students across the country. These insights make it clear that recovery must go beyond one-size-fits-all solutions; schools and districts need to focus on relationship-centered and data-informed approaches tailored to the specific needs of their students and communities."
Dr. Robert Balfanz
Director, the Everyone Graduates Center, Johns Hopkins University
Featured Analysis: The First Comprehensive Look at the Impact of the Pandemic on High School Graduation Rates
Broad national trends in high school graduation rates, including observed changes during and directly following peak pandemic years, have been documented. What is less understood is how high school graduation rates during the immediate years of the pandemic varied across states and districts, and what factors led to different outcomes across different locales.
The 2024 Educating America report is the most comprehensive investigation to date into the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and high school graduation rate trends, covering public school districts in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. It describes national, state, and school district graduation rate trajectories prior to and during the pandemic school years 2020–22, and provides the strongest evidence to date regarding the impacts of key state and district policies and actions during the pandemic on high school graduation rates.
Key Findings
National averages obscure significant variation in the pandemic’s impact on educational attainment across states and districts.
Although national high school graduation rates were marginally higher in 2022 than in 2019, most states actually saw a decline in graduation rates over that period.
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.
Graduation rate trajectories of certain historically underserved student groups differed from the broad national pattern. Students with disabilities experienced the largest gains in graduation rates between 2019 and 2022, and American Indian and Alaska Native students were the only student group investigated with a lower national graduation rate in 2022 than in 2019.
Students who were in 6th or 7th grade when the pandemic struck appear to show some of the most significant setbacks, indicating that the full toll of the pandemic on educational attainment may still be yet to come.