NC high schools should expect a big drop in the graduation rate next year. Here’s why.

High schools are bracing for a big drop in the graduation rate next year because of so many students repeating their freshmen year during the pandemic.

One in six high school freshmen in Wake County and across North Carolina weren’t promoted to the 10th grade after the end of the 2020-21 school year. Wake County school administrators warned this month that the consequences will be felt next spring in the graduation rate for the Class of 2024.

“We don’t really know what the impact is going to be on our graduation rate,” Brad McMillen, Wake’s assistant superintendent for data, research and accountability, told a school board committee.

“But we know it will not make it go up because students who were retained in ninth-grade have a much lower propensity to graduate on time than, obviously, students who moved straight from ninth to 10th grades.”

The four-year high school graduation rate last school year was 89.9% in Wake County and 86.4% statewide. The new graduation rate will be released by the state sometime next year.

“It’s sort of like a little rogue wave that’s been out at sea for a couple of years since the pandemic started and was so disruptive. And it’s now finally making its way ashore four years later as those students become the graduating class of the spring of 2024,” McMillen told the school board’s student achievement committee.

Online classes during the pandemic

The difficulty of transitioning to high school means the ninth grade historically accounts for the majority of students who aren’t promoted at the end of the school year.

But the 2020-21 school year was even more challenging for high school freshmen who took most or all of their classes online because of COVID-19 pandemic health concerns.

Attendance rates and grades plummeted after schools switched to online classes when in-person classes were suspended statewide in March 2020.

In Wake County, high schools didn’t reopen for limited in-person instruction until February 2021. Even then, Wake high school students had a cycle of one week of in-person classes followed by two weeks of online classes to try to keep class sizes down for social distancing purposes.

Wake didn’t resume daily in-person instruction for high school students until April 2021.

“(Freshmen) spent about the first three quarters of the year in remote instruction, and you can see there was a concomitant spike there in the percentage of kids who were retained at the end of that year,” McMillen said.

Big drop expected for Black and Hispanic students

Test scores plummeted nationwide in the 2020-21 school year. In North Carolina, some students felt behind academically by more than a year due to learning loss.

The academic drop led to 16% of freshmen in Wake County and statewide having to repeat ninth grade after the 2020-21 school year. In contrast, the rate was only 8.3% in Wake County after the 2018-19 school year.

“Given how much higher that retention point was compared to all of the previous ones, one of the things that we’ve been preparing for over the last couple of years is what impact that’s going to have on our four-year graduation rate this year,” McMillen said.

Schools have spent the past few years trying to help those freshmen get back on track to graduate. Students are recovering from the learning loss, but scores are still below pre-pandemic levels.

McMillen warned that the graduation rate drop could be particularly noticeable among Black and Hispanic students. For instance, Black and Hispanic students accounted for 75% of the 3,707 Wake students, across all grade levels, who were not promoted this year.

“Not only will that affect our district as a whole, but it’s probably going to have a little bit of a disparate impact on some of our subgroup graduation rates as well, because those students are so heavily over-represented in that group of students who’s typically retained.,” McMillen said.