In 2020, for example, 10 states had graduation rates of 90% or higher, but only five did in 2022, according to Tuesday’s analysis from the , a network of nonprofits working to improve student outcomes. 

But the report suggests that the full impact of COVID school closures on graduation rates has yet to be realized. This year’s seniors, for example, were seventh graders when the pandemic hit in March, 2020 and likely spent much of eighth grade learning remotely or in a cycle of on-again, off-again in-person learning. 

That’s why the pandemic’s effects on graduation rates and college enrollment could have a “long tail,” the report says. 

“Graduating from high school is a long process,” said Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, which supports the Grad Partnership. “It’s the younger kids that may be more impacted.”

The pandemic disturbed a trend of rising graduation rates that began in 2011, driven largely by gains among minorities. But an overall increase following the pandemic was due to state and local efforts to minimize the impact of the COVID emergency rather than actual educational improvement, Balfanz said.

State and local decisions to relax grading policies, accept late work and drop exit exam requirements gave the appearance that more students were meeting expectations. That’s why additional information, like whether ninth graders have earned enough credits to advance to 10th grade, chronic absenteeism data and the rates of students taking advanced courses have become increasingly valuable indicators of whether students are on track. 

Meanwhile, states and districts varied widely on how deeply COVID affected families, how long schools were closed and whether they were equipped to respond to the crisis. 

“We know some schools took extraordinary efforts to make sure their seniors graduated,” Balfanz said. “Others may not have had that capacity.” 

Some students lacked stable Wi-Fi at home or had to go to work when parents were sick, while other families had the resources to hire tutors and form pods or attended schools that reopened in the fall of 2020.

Ohio saw the largest increase in rates between 2019 and 2022 — from 82% to 86.2%, while New Jersey saw the greatest decline, from 90.6% to 85.2%. But actions in two large states — and — actually pushed the national rate to an all-time high, from 85.8% in 2019 to 86.6%.

Both states waived graduation requirements, like required courses and exams, for students. Meanwhile, New Jersey’s stricter definition of on-time graduation for students with disabilities likely contributed to the drop, the report said. 

At the district level, rates varied widely. Of the nearly 7,000 districts included in the analysis, about a third saw higher graduation rates in 2022 than in 2019, while roughly the same percentage saw a decline. Rates were stable in about 38% of districts.

But the data, Balfanz said, suggests that districts should start as soon as students enter high school to make sure they’re making progress toward graduation. 

 As part of their state accountability systems, six states currently monitor whether ninth graders are having a successful first year in high school. Data from five of those states — Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Oregon and Washington — shows significantly fewer students were on track in 2021-22 than in 2018-19.

“These students may bear more of the brunt of the pandemic’s impact on high school graduation rates than students who experienced the pandemic as 10th and 11th graders,” the report said.

Chronic absenteeism, which remains in some states, is also tougher to get under control at the high school level than in earlier grades and is “the wild card for a prolonged period of pandemic impacts on educational attainment,” the report said. 

‘Hybrid and weird’

Adam Larsen, assistant superintendent of the Oregon Community School District in Illinois, west of Chicago, remembers how much students who were seventh graders when schools shut down struggled in their freshman year. 

“That eighth grade year was hybrid and weird. We had social distancing and no vaccine,” he said. “Socially, they just didn’t mature. Freshman year tried to be normal, and they weren’t ready for normal.”

The Oregon district also offers an afterschool mentoring program, called Hawks Take Flight, designed to prevent students from falling so far behind, because of absenteeism or missing work, that they can’t graduate on time. 

At the weekly sessions, students talk about what’s getting in their way. If they meet their goals for the week, they earn prizes.

“Our graduation rate has been high and remains high because of the amount of support that we put in there,” Larsen said. “We have made it impossibly hard for students to fail unless they’ve chosen to fail.” 

‘Make the diploma meaningful’

The way districts used their $190 billion in pandemic relief money also determined whether students received enough help to keep up with their work. 

Diman Regional Vocational Technical High School, in Fall River, Massachusetts, near the border with Rhode Island, hired virtual tutors, conducted home visits and “looked at the crisis as an opportunity to use funds to support students,” said Andrew Rebello, who was principal at the school until this past August. 

In 2021, without any diploma expectations waived, the school hit a record 98% . Massachusetts, however, just changed those expectations. In the general election, voters decided to scrap the requirement that students pass exams in English, science and math in order to graduate.

The vote is a sign that the shift toward waiving high-stakes tests wasn’t limited to the pandemic.

Harry Felder, executive director of FairTest, which advocates against standardized testing, celebrated the outcome. “Parents, educators and policymakers realize that these tests fail as drivers of education that our young people need to thrive in the modern world.” he said in a . 

But Rebello, now assistant superintendent in another district, said he thinks the state needs to add a different requirement to “make the diploma meaningful.”

The growing backlash against high-stakes testing also creates the opportunity for a fresh “conversation about what really matters for high school graduation rates,” Balfanz said. 

While shows that getting good grades and taking rigorous courses might be greater predictors of success in college than a single test score, there are also concerns that no longer reflect subject mastery. 

“This is a huge debate,” Balfanz said. “But, post-pandemic, we do need to revise what we expect of our kids.”

The analysis, from and the at Johns Hopkins University, looked at that found more than 14 million chronically absent students during the 2021-22 academic year — an increase of nearly seven million students compared to 2017-18.

Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center, said an “all hands on deck” approach is needed to address widespread absenteeism in the aftermath of the pandemic.

“If you can imagine a rising tide, students who were a little underwater are now underwater more and those that weren’t underwater before now are,” Balfanz told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

This analysis served as a second look into the attendance trend which previously showed how across the country were enrolled in schools with high or extreme chronic absenteeism — more than twice the rate compared to the 2017-18 academic year.

Students are considered chronically absent if they miss at least , or roughly 18 days.

Although the attendance trend affected students of all ethnic backgrounds, Latino students took the brunt of the declines — increasing from nearly 2.4 million in 2017-18 to five million in 2021-22, a 53 percent jump.

Pacific Islander students saw the second biggest jump of 46 percent, white students by 39 percent, Black students by 36 percent and Native American students by 29 percent.

Balfanz said pandemic-era challenges for low-income and immigrant families pulled students away from school and contributed to the widening attendance gaps.

“Many kids got jobs because their parents lost theirs and became a lot more restricted,” Balfanz said, adding how Latino students often faced this burden compared to other ethnic groups.

He added how “caregiving” also played a major factor in declining Latino student attendance — often coming from multigenerational families with stronger cultural expectations to look after younger siblings.

The attendance trend was also observed geographically, particularly impacting students in both suburban and rural areas.

Chronic absenteeism in suburban and rural school districts jumped to 5.1 million and 2.5 million students respectively in 2021-22 — a 46 percent and 47 percent increase compared to 2.8 million and 1.4 million in 2017-18.

Schools in cities experienced an increase of 44 percent and districts in towns jumped by 42 percent.

Hedy Chang, founder and executive director of Attendance Works, said “inequitable access to needed [healthcare] services and poor transportation” during the pandemic contributed to the attendance gaps in rural areas.

The greatest increases in chronic absenteeism occurred among schools serving larger numbers of students living in poverty, the analysis found.

Among schools with 75 percent or more students receiving free or reduced-price lunch, chronic absence nearly tripled — from 25 percent to 69 percent. 

Chang said poverty was the driving force behind student chronic absenteeism nationwide.

“Kids who are living in poverty are much more likely to have all of these barriers when it comes to aversion and disengagement,” Chang told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

“It’s hard for students to keep going when they feel like nobody knows them or nobody cares,” Balfanz added. “Solving that disconnect they have is a great first step.”

In the 2021-22 school year, more than one in four U.S. public school students missed at least 10% of school days. Before the pandemic, it was closer to one in seven, the Associated Press , relying on data from 40 states and the District of Columbia. 

In New York City, the nation’s largest district, chronic absenteeism , according to district officials, meaning some 375,000 students were regularly absent. In Washington, D.C., it . In Detroit, .

Data are just beginning to emerge for the most recent school year, but a few snapshots present a troubling picture:

• In Oakland, Calif., district officials said were chronically absent in the 2022-23 school year; 
• In Providence, R.I., the district in September said of students missed at least 10 percent last year;
• And in suburban , near Washington, D.C., about 27% of students were chronically absent last year, up from 20% four years earlier. As elsewhere, high school students were more likely to be chronically absent. 

While many policymakers have cited disconnection from school as a key reason for the problem, others say it has different causes unique to the times we’re in — causes that educators have rarely had to deal with so fully until now, from the death of caregivers to rising teacher absences and even, for older students, a more attractive labor market. 

Here, according to researchers, school officials and parents’ organizations, among others, are six hidden (and not-so-hidden) reasons that chronic absenteeism rates remain high.

1. Worsening mental health

In a by the National Center for Education Statistics, 70% of public schools reported an increase in the percentage of students seeking mental health services at school since the start of the pandemic; 76% reported an increase in staff voicing concerns about students with symptoms of depression, anxiety and trauma.

And after modest declines in 2019 and 2020, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported during the pandemic. Suicides are rising fastest among young people, among other groups.

“We’re in the middle of a mental health crisis for kids,” said , president of the National Parents Union. She said mental health support, both in our public education system and larger health care system, is inadequate to deal with the crisis.

“Kids are literally refusing to go [to school]. That is a major issue that I hear from parents every day. ‘I can’t get my kid up. They do not want to go.’”

For many students, school has lost its value, she said, “because there’s not a lot of meat on the bone,” either because instruction has worsened or because many students feel they can do what’s required from home. 

2. Death of caregivers

As many as in the U.S. have lost one or both parents to the pandemic, researchers now estimate, with about 359,000 losing a primary or secondary caregiver, including a grandparent.

Those losses hit hardest in multigenerational, low-income households, since many grandparents and other relatives were playing caregiving roles, said , a research professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education. “It now falls to the teenagers,” he said. Even those who don’t care for younger siblings may now need to do so for surviving parents or even grandparents, making school less of a priority.

3. Teacher absences 

Among the most politically charged storylines to emerge from the pandemic was the that of teachers and other school staff pushing to ensure their safety, often by keeping schools operating remotely or demanding generous COVID-related sick-day policies.

The result has been an explosion of teacher absenteeism alongside that of students. In Illinois, just 66% of teachers had fewer than 10 absences in 2022. In west of Chicago, it was even lower at just 54% of teachers.

A May 2022 found that chronic teacher absenteeism during the 2021-22 school year had increased in 72% of schools, compared to a typical pre-pandemic school year. In 37% of schools, teacher absenteeism increased “a lot.”  

Simultaneously, it found, 60% of schools nationwide found it harder to find substitute teachers. And when subs couldn’t be found, 73% of schools brought in administrators to cover classes.

That makes school a lot less valuable for students, said Rodrigues. “What we saw in COVID is how little instruction many of our kids are actually getting,” she said. “And so it’s very hard as a parent to make the argument: ‘No, you’ve got to go. This is important for your future,’ when all you’re doing there is sitting and watching a movie because you have a sub again and again and again.”

4. Remote assignments

While many students struggled to keep up with schoolwork during the pandemic, the experience revolutionized schools’ thinking about remote learning. Most significantly, it gave students the ability to complete classwork entirely at home, without stepping into the school building. In many districts, schools have continued to allow students to, in essence, work from home like their parents.

Combined with looser rules around sick-day attendance, observers say, this has resulted in millions of students — and their parents — deciding that five-day-a-week school attendance is no longer mandatory. 

“Kids don’t see why they can’t ,” said Tim Daly, former president of TNTP and co-founder of the consulting firm . In a recent issue of his newsletter, Daly noted that when students miss a day of school, “all the work is available online in real-time, making it simple for a student to complete it all from home before the day is even done.”

Given the low quality of instruction that many parents saw during the pandemic, he said, parents now are less likely to worry if their child is missing a day. “Sitting in a desk for six hours a day,” he wrote, “is for suckers.”

Student testimonials bear that out, said Montgomery County’s Neff.

Students in focus groups now tell administrators that five-day-a-week attendance now seems optional, he said. “They’ve told us repeatedly, ‘We got so used to a year-and-a-half or more taking classes, sitting on our bed in our pajamas on our computer.’ And many of them are continuing a struggle to get back into school regularly.”

Students who learned reasonably well at home, he said, now wonder, “‘Why are you telling me now I have to sit in seven periods a day for five days a week?’ 

At one of the nation’s most renowned suburban high schools, New Trier High School near Chicago, the percentage of chronically absent students rose to more than 25% last winter, the Chicago Tribune . Absenteeism rose as students got older, officials noted, with rates of just over 14% for freshmen but nearly 38% for seniors.

By late May, even the student editors of the school newspaper declared that they : “While this trend isn’t unique to New Trier,” they wrote in an editorial, “it’s also not acceptable. We believe that both the school and students need to do more.”

Jean Hahn, a New Trier board member, last spring pointed out that many adults now work remotely. “So many of us don’t have to be at our desk 9-5 Monday through Friday anymore,” Hahn told attendees at a board meeting. “It’s challenging for parents to explain to our young people why they do.”

5. A higher minimum wage

Over the past few years, more than half of the 50 states have been in a kind of arms race to raise their minimum wage, tempting teens to trim their school hours or drop out altogether to help their families get by.

While the federal minimum wage since 2009 has remained $7.25, 30 states have set theirs higher, according to the left-leaning . While just four states and the District of Columbia now guarantee a minimum wage at or above $15, eight states are on pace to get there by 2026 or sooner.

In states offering $15 an hour, said Hopkins’ Balfanz, this likely made the absentee problem worse. 

“That’s real money to a 17-year-old,” he said, offering them both a bit of personal agency and the opportunity to help out their families. “Things that did not make sense at $6 an hour do make sense, then, at $15.”

Steven Neff, director of pupil personnel and attendance services for Montgomery County Public Schools, the suburban D.C. district, said students “are telling us that there is great value in being able to have a job that is paying reasonably well.” Minimum wage work, he said, now “has even greater financial enticements than when I think about minimum wage when I was their age.” 

6. Better record-keeping

One reason why chronic absenteeism seems to be spreading may have less to do with actual attendance and more with better record-keeping by districts and states.

Until recently, researchers found that the problem was often confined mostly to high-poverty neighborhoods. 

But here’s the thing: A decade ago, few schools even kept track of chronic absenteeism. Most states didn’t actively track it until 2016, when new flexibility under the federal allowed them to choose indicators of school quality according to their own desired outcomes. That’s when about 30 states made it an indicator in their accountability systems — and on school report cards.

Before that, Balfanz said, school districts typically measured average daily attendance, which could actually mask high chronic absenteeism that lurked around the edges. It’s mathematically possible, he said, to have an average daily attendance of 92% “but still have a fifth of your kids missing a month of school. Different kids on different days are making up that 92%.”

So by 2020, when the pandemic hit, schools had only been tracking it for a few years and had few good strategies to address it, Balfanz said. “It’s relatively new. And then the pandemic spread it everywhere.”

Where do we go from here?

At New Trier, student pressure eventually paid off, resulting in a new plan this fall: In preparation for the 2023-24 school year, a school committee recommended for absences, including just five “mental health days” per year. It also bans students from participating in extracurriculars if they’re not in class that day. They’ll get an email by 3:15 p.m. notifying them not to show up to sports or other activities.

Simple interventions can also help: A found that offering parents personalized nudges by mail about their kids’ absences reduced chronic absenteeism by 10% or more, partly by correcting parents’ incorrect beliefs that their kids hadn’t missed as much school as they actually had — research shows that both parents and students underestimate it by nearly 50%.

That’s probably preferable to how many schools attack the problem, via “supportive” phone calls home, said Hopkins’ Balfanz. “Who’s going to make 150 phone calls a day in a school?” he said. “If you have that one person assigned to it, they literally would be spending the whole day calling.”

EdNavigator’s Daly says schools should reset the discussion around attendance, urging parents to let their kids miss school as rarely as possible and communicate honestly about absentee rates.

Neff, the Montgomery County attendance services director, said transparency “increases the urgency in all of us” and is essential if schools want to get parents on board.

“In order to fully have them understand the gravity of the situation, we needed to show them: ‘Here is our data. Here is where it was, here is where it is and where it is for certain groups. We need your help to fix this.’ ”

That’s how the U.S. Department of Education released last month for the 2020-21 school year. But more recent data, available from just four states, suggests the government’s figures seriously “undercount” the problem’s scope. 

If the rest of the country saw rates as high as those in California, Connecticut, Ohio and Virginia, that would mean over 16 million students missed large chunks of the 2021-22 school year. 

Compared to pre-pandemic rates in 2018-19, “we will likely see a doubling in chronic absence,” said Hedy Chang, executive director of the nonprofit Attendance Works, which teamed with researchers at Johns Hopkins University . Those numbers showed that 10.1 million students missed at least 10% of the 2020-21 school year.  

Data Analysis

Chronic Absenteeism Rates:
Before and During Pandemic

One reason Chang suspects the federal count to be too low is because of the leap in chronic absenteeism in those four states. For example, the federal count shows 15.3% of California students were chronically absent in 2020-21. But according to , a company that works with districts to improve attendance, 27.4% of students were in the chronic to severe range last year — a time when schools were mostly open.

‘Highly dubious’

Attendance Works partnered with the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins to compile statewide chronic absence data available on the Education Department’s ED Data Express . But they call some of what they found “highly dubious.”

The attendance data is flawed, Chang explained, because of the inconsistent ways states and districts calculated attendance during remote learning. Some students were marked present if they just logged into Zoom and left. This year, she added, states and districts not only face the challenge of improving the way they track the data and release it to the public, but also reengaging students who missed large portions of last school year.

The data shows, for example, that only 3.7% of Idaho students were chronically absent in the 2020-21 school year, but , such as Coeur d’Alene and Boise, are reporting rates in the 10% to 15% range. 

In five states, chronic absenteeism rates actually went down. That’s unlikely, Chang said.

At the other end of the spectrum, rates in Arizona, Kentucky, Nevada and New Mexico were at least 30%. But that could still be far from accurate. Districts such as the Albuquerque Public Schools saw rates as high last school year.

Marguerite Roza and Chad Aldeman of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab drew attention to the lack of accurate education in a recent saying public schools have “missed the data revolution.”

“Good luck getting real-time data on how many children are enrolled in public schools, are chronically absent, or are making academic progress as a result of federally funded relief efforts,” they wrote. “We don’t have it on a national level. States don’t have it. Neither do most districts.”

In New Mexico, officials say just because most schools are no longer engaged in remote learning doesn’t mean the need to clearly define attendance for students learning virtually and collect accurate data is gone.

Some families still choose virtual when it’s available, and some schools use online learning for teacher training or emergencies, like a gas leak. Officials are currently drafting new guidelines to help districts count attendance for students learning at home and those planning to finish by January.

“We’re working on guardrails,” said Gregory Frostad, the director of policy and legislative affairs for the New Mexico Public Education Department, “There can be good reasons [for remote learning]. We don’t have to just say that learning can’t continue.” 

‘One of the best indicators’

Skyrocketing absenteeism, meanwhile, is helping Robert Balfanz, who leads the Johns Hopkins center, target efforts to match students with tutors and mentors as part of a new national effort announced in July. The National Partnership for Student Success, housed in the center, is fielding requests for assistance from districts, nonprofits and government agencies. 

Chronic absenteeism is “one of the best indicators of which schools are likely in need of additional 
 supports,” Balfanz said. “It signals both a high likelihood of interrupted instruction and disconnection from school.”

The partnership’s website offers a where potential tutors and mentors can search for opportunities to serve in their community.

Chang said her organization has also been hit with a “deluge” of requests for expertise on tracking data. She’s encouraged that district leaders have boosted training for school staff instead of “just throwing up their arms and saying ‘Oh no.’ ”

Districts and other community agencies have launched an array of efforts to . In , teams of educators — including social workers, administrators, nurses and teachers — are delving into the reasons students aren’t showing up. 

And in California’s Merced County, the district attorney’s office started whose children have missed so much school that they’re at risk of being referred to the juvenile justice system.

“We try not to treat them like they’re in trouble,” said Monica Adrian, a behavior support specialist with the Merced County Office of Education. “We look at 
 some of the stressors that might lead to chronic absenteeism. There’s always another side of the story.”

But Chang said there was still so much disruption last school year — with quarantines and high staff vacancies — that it was hard to determine if those strategies made an impact.

“I think we’ll know better this year whether people are able to engage students [when it’s] a little less crazy,” she said.

Almost 90% of respondents to the latest School Pulse Panel survey from the National Center for Education Statistics blame pandemic-related disruptions, including quarantines and staff absences, for the lack of progress. But limited efforts to ramp up tutoring programs could also be a factor.

More than half of public schools reported using high-dosage tutoring to help students make up for lost learning, and many offered tutoring as part of summer learning and enrichment programs this year. 

But experts, including one charged with leading the U.S. Department of Education’s new effort to recruit 250,000 tutors and mentors, offered a degree of skepticism. Robert Balfanz, a Johns Hopkins University researcher overseeing the , said that many schools have made strong efforts to provide tutoring. But they also relied largely on teachers, who have been stretched thin because of staffing shortages. 

A June of spending plans in over 5,000 districts, from FutureEd at Georgetown University, showed that 1,258 districts planned to implement tutoring..

“I can believe that half of schools attempted to provide tutoring and did so, at some scale, for some period of time,” he said. “I think it’s unlikely that half of schools have and are sustaining high-dosage tutoring at the scale that is needed or beneficial.”

As schools begin a fourth year touched by the pandemic, the data from almost 860 schools provides a glimpse into what school leaders and families can expect as students return to class. Leaders report significant staff burnout and ongoing concerns about filling both teaching and non-teaching positions. But with many educators saying last school year was the hardest they’ve ever been though, some are choosing to adopt a positive outlook toward the months ahead. 

“I honestly think that when we can get the social element under control — routines 
 and  breaking cell phone habits — we can get more than a year of material taught at a time,”  Jay Wamstead, an eighth grade math teacher at Campbell Middle School in Smyrna, Georgia, told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·. 

The hardest part of last year, he said, was teachers’ sense of how far behind students were socially. 

“I’m not sure we’ll be back to 2019 levels of ‘normal,’ but last year was insane for me as well as everyone I talked to,” he said.

Six of his math team’s 16 teachers left after last year, including two who taught at the school for over a decade. That means a lot of new faces this fall, and for some school leaders, additional holes to fill. 

‘Urgent needs’ 

Schools have an average of three teacher vacancies, with shortages hitting larger schools and those serving more poor and minority students the hardest, according to the survey. Rodriguez said staff shortages “are acute and they pose urgent needs.” It’s a frequent concern he hears from school and district leaders. 

On average, leaders were also still trying to fill three non-teaching positions, with multiple vacancies in transportation and custodial services. 

But shortages were an before the pandemic. And based on recent Bureau of Labor Statistics , the Pulse Panel data seems high, said Chad Aldeman, policy director at Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. If every school had at least six vacancies, that would translate to 600,000 openings nationally. According to the federal data, there were 300,000 openings for both K-12 and higher education in June. 

Regardless, 84% of leaders expect hiring mental health professionals for this fall to be somewhat or very difficult, at a time when educators continue to report greater needs among students.

“It’s clear that we’re facing a youth mental health crisis in communities across our country,” Roberto Rodriquez, assistant secretary for planning, evaluation and policy development at the U.S. Department of Education, said during a call with reporters.

According to the survey, the majority of respondents reported providing mental health services, with more than 40% saying those efforts have been very or extremely effective at addressing students’ needs. 

But the Biden administration aims to do more. Rodriguez touted last week’s White House announcement to make almost $300 million in competitive available for mental health services in schools. Efforts will include adding more counselors, social workers and school psychologists and funding partnerships with higher education to get more people into the field. 

Schools have positions for mental health professionals “that are open for an entire school year that don’t get filled,” said Sasha Pudleski, director of advocacy at AASA, the School Superintendents Association. She added that while schools have expanded telehealth options to address mental health needs, they “would prefer to have someone full time.”

Amanda Fitzgerald, assistant deputy executive director at the American School Counselor Association, said states in the northeast tend to have an oversupply of school counseling graduates, but needs are greater in states such as Arizona, Oklahoma and Colorado.

The new grant programs will be helpful, she said, if they can remove barriers for those who lack full credentials. Some professionals, she said, have a background in mental health, but don’t have a school counselor license, and a lot of high school educators focus on college and career transitions, but lack mental health expertise.

“They don’t want to go back to school to get a similar degree when their end game is to still help people,” she said. 

‘Don’t know what to expect’ 

The survey also sheds light on what school leaders believe have been the most helpful strategies to address learning loss. 

Forty-three percent said high-dosage tutoring — 30-minute, one-on-one or small group sessions at least three times a week — has been very or extremely effective at addressing gaps in students’ learning. About a quarter of respondents said their school also provided a high-quality tutoring model as part of their summer learning programs.   

The majority of respondents said their schools used remedial instruction — covering material from a prior grade level — to address learning gaps, but they didn’t think it was as effective as tutoring. Only about a third found remediation to be very or extremely effective. 

Another aspect of last year that was overwhelming for many teachers was the wide range of student learning needs within one classroom, said Katherine Holden, principal of Talent Middle School in Phoenix, Oregon. 

Federal funds, she said, have made it possible to hire additional staff and purchase materials to give students the specific practice they need. She’s also relieved that she was able to fill all of her open positions and hire  full-time substitutes in case  teachers need to be out.

But she said she’ll have to continue to be “aggressive” about reducing absenteeism so students can benefit.

“We’re probably cautiously optimistic,” she told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·. “But if these last two years have taught us anything it’s that you don’t know what to expect.”

They included ninth graders who didn’t earn any credits in their first semester and those who should have been in 10th grade, but were out of school for a year.

“You don’t normally refer younger kids to dropout recovery,” Franco said. “Some of them are like, ‘What’s a credit?’” 

Those students who were held back are among the reasons Texas saw a 9% increase in its freshman class this year, more than four times the state’s annual growth rate prior to the pandemic. 

That pattern has been demonstrated in more than a dozen states, according to enrollment data compiled by Burbio, an information services company, and shared exclusively with Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

The new data, from 35 states and the District of Columbia, adds to the complicated picture of students’ comings and goings during the COVID era. With many young children who delayed pre-K and kindergarten during school closures now flooding back into the education system, an enrollment surge in the early grades was expected. But 15 states and D.C. saw growth in ninth grade of at least 5% compared to 2020-21, and in a few states, including New Mexico and North Carolina, the increase in freshmen far outpaced that of kindergartners. 

While the return of families to public schools contributed to growth in ninth grade this year, retention rates have nearly doubled in some states and districts, and educators don’t expect next year to be much better. 

“We’re a generation that’s going to have people with two-year holes in their education,” said Jeffrey Cole, principal at Winston County High, a rural Alabama school about midway between Huntsville and Birmingham.

If freshmen only fail two quarters, Cole usually moves them on to 10th grade. But for the first time in his 19 years as principal, he has students failing all four quarters. He thinks they should have stayed in eighth grade. Across the state, enrollment in ninth grade has jumped at a much higher rate than before the pandemic.

Districts often see a “bulge” in freshman year when students don’t pass enough classes to move on, said Eric Wearne, director of the Education Economics Center at Kennesaw State University, outside Atlanta. But he added it’s not a surprise COVID disruptions and remote learning made matters much worse.

“Students were in ninth grade,” he said, “and the COVID situation was so tough that more of them than usual didn’t earn enough credits to be considered 10^th graders yet.”

Retention data in some states and districts back that up. Figures from last fall show that 18% of ninth graders in the Houston Independent School District repeated the year, significantly higher than the district’s pre-pandemic rate of 10%. And in North Carolina, more than 16% of last year’s freshman class was retained — roughly double the rate of past years. District officials from rural Maryland to Albuquerque, New Mexico, also saw higher retention rates this year.

The majority of states where ninth grade enrollment surpassed 5% are concentrated in the South, where they have “well-defined promotion criteria” for freshmen, such as end-of-course exams, explained Robert Balfanz, who directs the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. Such policies were widely implemented in the early 2000s at the start of the accountability-driven No Child Left Behind era, but have since been suspended in many states.

What hasn’t changed, he said, is that students still need to earn enough credits to graduate.

“It’s the long tail of the pandemic,” he said. “This will impact graduation rates three years from now.”

He added that during remote learning, high school students were more likely to have assignments without live instruction and had to “self-manage getting the work done.” With many high schools canceling orientation in the fall of 2020, he said rising ninth graders might not have fully understood the consequences of failing a class.

‘Fell off the radar’

The retention increase is one example of how the pandemic has altered existing patterns that enrollment forecasters use to help districts plan for the future. In his work with school districts, Jerry Oelerich, a senior analyst at the consulting company Flo-Analytics, accounts for the fact that 2007 — when most of this year’s ninth graders were born — was a for births. That alone, however, doesn’t fully explain the big increases some states are seeing in ninth grade, Oelerich said. 

Private school enrollment and also grew last year. But students often return to traditional high schools to play sports. And many parents decide they’re not cut out to teach high schoolers. 

“Their expertise kind of runs out,” said Kent Martin, a senior analyst at Flo-Analytics and a former teacher and administrator in Washington state. “You really need to be a content expert, like a teacher.”

Ronn Nozoe, CEO at the National Association of Secondary School Principals, said it makes sense that with schools predominantly open this year, families who opted for private schools would return and “save their money.”

“There are a lot of kids who fell off the radar,” Nozoe said. “If you’re going to move back in, you want to start that in ninth — not 10th, 11th or 12th.”

That’s what Virginia mother Kate O’Harra decided after she pulled her son Jack Mulhall out of the Loudoun County district last year and enrolled him in Stride (formerly K12), a national network of virtual schools, for eighth grade. 

“He didn’t do terrible,” even though O’Harra, a pilates instructor, and her husband, an IT professional, weren’t always available to help him with schoolwork. When schools closed, Jack was on his way to overcoming some of the scatteredness that comes with his ADHD. But the district’s remote learning program, which O’Harra described as “a complete and utter failure,” interrupted that progress.

“We were in a good place pre-COVID. Now it’s all over the map.”

The affluent suburb has been at the center of several over the rights of transgender students and the use of so-called “critical race theory.” But Jack’s desire to return to school with his friends and her wish for a normal school structure convinced O’Harra to return to the district for ninth grade.

Still, the move hasn’t solved everything for Jack, now at Woodgrove High School. 

“We went into 9^th grade very unprepared,” said his mother, adding that after a year of remote learning, he struggles with some social cues, like not knowing how to take a joke. 

Jack said his only contact with friends during eighth grade was playing “Call of Duty,” and the one person he met virtually through Stride was his math teacher. He’s still missing some organizational skills and fell behind in Spanish and earth science. He’ll start next year with a tutor.

“I didn’t really have assignments for science [in eighth grade]. I was left drifting without any knowledge,” he said. But back in a traditional school, Jack plays football and lacrosse and said, “I can actually see and talk to my teachers in real life.” 

Nationwide in Stride dropped slightly this year — down to 187,000 from 189,400 last year, but still well above the pre-pandemic figure of about 123,000. 

Virtual programs are another reason some district’s ninth grade classes are swelling. The Mecklenburg County Public Schools in Virginia, a rural district not far from the North Carolina state line, offered a virtual option through Stride so parents still concerned about COVID wouldn’t withdraw their children to homeschool and the district wouldn’t lose funding. 

The virtual program boosted ninth grade enrollment from 337 in 2020-21 to 609 this year. But Superintendent Paul Nichols has regrets and suggested that remote instruction shares some of the blame for students veering off track.

“We will offer no virtual education options for students next year,” he said. “We are concerned that most of them have not completed much, if any, actual academic work.”