Colorado, Michigan, Illinois, and several other states reported jumps in their dropout rates this past year. This month, North Carolina officials said that the state’s dropout numbers were 17% higher than pre-pandemic.

But the scale of the problem remains hard to define. While a diploma is a definitive sign of high completion, classifying a student as having dropped out is a more ambiguous process that can take time and effort by staff — complicated by the fact that some students will take longer than four years to complete their requirements.

“We don’t really have a handle on the post-pandemic story yet,” said Robert Balfanz, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education. “A little bit of this comes down to how much administrative effort a school puts into keeping their data up to date.”

For that and other reasons, experts caution against focusing too closely on the specific dropout rates themselves, which can lag years behind more reliable measures. Instead, they said attention should be on earlier indicators of academic struggle — and helping students like Clarke get across the finish line.

Across states, high school graduation rates held steady when the pandemic first hit, but dipped for the class of 2021. In 2022, states generally saw only slight shifts.

Dropout rates are messier. No recent federal data shows where the country’s dropout rate sits, and state and local district data reveals a varying picture. In Kansas, state reports show the dropout rate fell slightly in 2022, even as other areas saw upticks.

Read the full article about dropout rates by Julian Shen-Berro at Chalkbeat.