Minnesota graduation rates fall as students absorb pandemic disruptions
Despite persistent racial disparities, Black student grad rates increased slightly over last year
Just over 83 percent of Minnesota’s class of 2021 was able to graduate within four years. That’s according to the latest release of data from the state Education Department.
It’s a drop of 0.5 percentage points compared to the class of 2020, whose senior year of high school only saw three months of pandemic-related disruptions. This most recent data reflects graduation rates in the first full school year affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
For Joe Munnich, who is managing director of the Twin Cities nonprofit Generation Next, the rate decrease is not as dramatic as expected.
“I really see that as holding steady,” Munnich said. “To me, as we think about the context of COVID, the murder of George Floyd and the aftermath that, this group of students has experienced at a really critical point — to see that not go down precipitously overall was better than I might have imagined. I won’t say it was a good sign.”
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Munnich said the fact that the decline in rates is not more dramatic, is a sign that “those supports and services that were put into place to support those students did seem to help most of them to finish.”
But he warns that the pandemic disruptions to in-person classes will likely continue to affect students for years to come, and possibly show up in on-going declines to the the graduation rate.
“The storm hit, they were still a ways from the finish line, and the storm continues,” Munnich said. “Racial injustice is ongoing, the pandemic is ongoing. Even if everything were to end today, there are still groups of students coming through that are impacted and whose outcomes will be impacted for years to come.”
The half-a-percentage point drop in the class of 2021’s graduation rates corresponds to an 0.3 percentage point increase in the dropout rate and a 0.2 percentage point increase in the unknown rate — a designation that could signify a student has transferred, moved, dropped out or left for other reasons and not notified their district.
But state education officials point out that 80 percent of the class of 2021 who dropped out were eligible for free and reduced-price lunch and a disproportionate number were experiencing homelessness as well. Similar numbers of those designated as “unknown” were designated as being eligible for free and reduced-price meals.
“Housing, access to health care, access for food — all of those things actually make a difference. The economic insecurity that happened, especially throughout the pandemic, can have a significant impact on our students’ ability to succeed in high school. That’s what we’re seeing front and center,” said Education Commissioner Heather Mueller. “We cannot continue to look at graduation in isolation of what happens outside of the school day.”
Gaps in graduation rates between white students and Black students, Native American students and Hispanic students persisted in 2021, although Black students saw a 1.5 percentage point increase in graduation rates.
“The underlying conditions haven’t changed in our system. We still have a system that was built for a group of students that no longer make up the majority,” Munnich said. “As we see our system becoming more diverse, which is a good thing, we need to change our system to support the students that we have.”