Nat Malkus and Sam Hollon explore the continuing impact of the nation’s poor response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic and schools’ responses to it resulted in learning loss that reversed two decades of progress on student achievement and drove chronic absenteeism to unprecedented heights. Yet graduation rates did not fall over the same period— instead, they rose. How could this be? This report investigates how chronic absenteeism, graduation rates, and the relationship between the two have changed since the years before the pandemic. We find that the relationship between chronic absenteeism and graduation rates weakened by half during the pandemic. That is, a district’s chronic absenteeism rate seems to matter less to its graduation rate than it did before the pandemic, controlling for other important factors. If the relationship had not weakened, we estimate the national graduation rate would have been almost three points lower in 2022, equating to over 100,000 fewer graduates in that year alone.
Our findings regarding the weakened relationship between absenteeism and graduation raise two pressing questions: Was this change by design? And is this change good for student achievement? We believe that the answer to both questions is no. The most plausible explanation for the weakened relationship is that—by no one’s conscious design, but rather as a side effect of other pandemic-era decisions— states, districts, and schools created new avenues for students to learn less and still graduate. The onus is now on policymakers, administrators, and educators to deliberately determine how important attendance ought to be. If we believe that attending school should be valuable and necessary to students’ success, it is time to make it so again. …
… Against this backdrop, students’ dramatic pandemic learning losses—reversing about two decades of hard-won progress—are lamentable but unsurprising. Likewise, the post-pandemic surge in chronic absenteeism—nationally, chronic absenteeism rates rose to unprecedented heights in 2021–22 and remain stubbornly high today—is understandable. What is surprising, though, given falling academic achievement and elevated rates of chronic absenteeism, is that high school graduation rates did not fall during this period. Instead, they rose.
