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The percentage of Texas high schoolers who left school before graduating dropped to an all-time low last year, according to a study of high school attrition rates by the Intercultural Development Research Association, or IDRA.
According to the nonprofit research and advocacy group, 18% of students who started 9th grade in Texas in the fall of 2020 left school before graduating last year.
That’s the lowest attrition rate IDRA has found since they started calculating it in 1986.
The attrition rate for Latino students also reached a historic low of 22% last year, and the attrition rate for Black students returned to its previous all-time low of 23%.
“That speaks volumes, I think, for not only schools' responses to historical issues with serving historically disenfranchised students, but to the great work of advocacy groups and organizers and community-based organizations who have put a lot of effort into designing and implementing programs that aims to increase engagement of students, aims to increase schools' capacity for holding these students and graduating them,” said IDRA research analyst Christina Quintanilla-Muñoz.
Quintanilla-Muñoz took over the attrition study three years ago. She uses the same calculation to measure attrition while adjusting for changes in enrollment that IDRA first used in 1986.
“For IDRA, attrition is an important indicator for what we define as a school's holding power, or a school's ability to retain students until they are able to successfully graduate,” Quintanilla-Muñoz said. “It's actually really useful for understanding the magnitude of dropouts and how different each of these patterns can emerge locally, geographically, more specifically, across the county levels.”
According to IDRA’s analysis, Bexar County actually had very similar results to the state last year, with a 22% high school attrition rate for Latino students and 21% rate for Black students.
Zeroing into other counties, however, shows a different picture. For instance, Jefferson County, which includes Beaumont, is trending upward. The southeast Texas county’s attrition rate has increased 7 percentage points since 2019, and the Black student attrition rate was 30% last year.
Statewide, IDRA’s adjusted attrition rate hit a peak of 43% in 1997, then steadily declined each year until it reached 19% in 2021. The percentage of students leaving school before graduating went up for two years before hitting the all-time low of 18% last year — a possible sign that efforts to combat attendance issues after the pandemic are having an effect.
IDRA points to six strategies that help students stay in school and graduate: reducing exclusionary discipline, limiting the number of students held back a grade, support for English Learners, robust, culturally responsive curriculum, reduced high-stakes testing, and sufficient funding.
“It comes directly from the students and the parents and the teachers and the education leaders that these are the interventions that work,” Quintanilla-Muñoz said, pointing to IDRA’s practice of holding focus groups and meetings with numerous community groups.
“At the most fundamental level, students stay in school and perform better then they feel welcome, safe and secure,” Celina Moreno, IDRA’s president and CEO, summarized in a statement.
However, despite the excitement of a record low attrition rate, IDRA researchers and leaders said there is also a lot of room for improvement.
“Overall, 18% is a great figure to be at respective to where we've been at before, but if we translate it, one out of every five students is not graduating,” Quintanilla-Muñoz said. “Our (communications) team did a conversion to students per hour, and that would be seven students per hour. And so, that is quite a high number for us as a state. To be losing that many potential thought leaders in our state is too high.”
IDRA’s attrition report also finds that longstanding racial disparities in attrition rates remain. Black and Latino students in the class of 2024 left school at about twice the rate of white students — a trend that’s remained the same since IDRA began the study nearly 40 years ago.
“I think that speaks to compounding injustices that our disenfranchised students have experienced and are still experiencing in schools, particularly through the exclusionary discipline and students who are held back or even routed into learning tracks that have fewer courses that are advanced courses that would keep students engaged and prepared for college,” Quintanilla-Muñoz said.
IDRA’s data is also much less rosy than the nearly 91% statewide high school graduation rate reported by the Texas Education Agency for 2024.
The nonprofit thinks the state’s data is likely inflated by excluding students who should be counted as dropouts but are instead listed as leaving for other reasons.
For instance, IDRA found that more than 40,000 students in Texas schools were recorded as leaving for “unknown reasons” during the 2022-2023 school year, and more than 30,000 were recorded as leaving for homeschool.
TEA does calculate attrition for Texas schools, but Quintanilla-Muñoz said they use a simple calculation that doesn’t account for enrollment changes.
“I like the idea of us, our study, sort of offering this bridge in understanding between all these different metrics for assessing the success of schools' capacity to retain students and graduate them,” she said. “Our study can provide sort of that intermediary understanding of what exactly happens to those students and why and how we can respond in a much more sustainable way.”
