• By Christina Quintanilla-Muñoz, M.Ed., & Joanna Sánchez, Ph.D.• IDRA Newsletter • October 2024 •
Texas high schools lost 22% of their high school students in 2022-23. This is a key finding of IDRA’s 38th annual report on trends in student dropout and attrition from Texas public high schools.
IDRA’s latest report presents state and county attrition rates for 2022-23 based on fall student enrollment data by the Texas Education Agency (TEA).
This year’s report is particularly significant as it marks the first attrition study with a full cohort of students who began high school as freshmen when the COVID-19 pandemic began. It provides critical insights into how the pandemic affected student retention, as this cohort of students faced unprecedented challenges during their high school experience.
In October 1986, IDRA released the first comprehensive study of school dropouts in Texas for the 1985-86 school year, pioneering a now industry-wide standard for measuring high school attrition. Before IDRA’s original study, the state did not report data on school dropouts, leaving many students who had already left or were being lost from public schools largely unaccounted for.
This problem prompted IDRA to develop its original attrition methodology to calculate the number and percent of high school students leaving school prior to graduating with a high school diploma. IDRA’s hallmark study led to a new state law that requires the state to report dropout data each year.
Total attrition rates and those of the state’s largest groups (Black, Latino, white) are higher than the year before COVID-19.
IDRA has since continued to measure statewide attrition by applying the same theoretical and mathematical framework each year. Attrition rates are an indicator of schools’ holding power, or the ability to retain students in school until they graduate.
According to IDRA’s methodology, attrition is defined as the change in cohort size between the student population’s freshman and senior years. Therefore, an attrition rate is the percent change in grade level enrollment between a base year (freshman year) and an end year (senior year) of a class. This methodology facilitates ongoing comparative cohort analyses over time, and it provides insight into students lost during the four years of high school rather than just their senior year.
The 2022-23 statewide attrition rate of 22% is only 11 percentage points lower than the initial rate of 33% found in IDRA’s landmark 1985-86 study.
Overall, attrition has worsened for public high school students in Texas since 2020-21. And while statewide attrition rates across racial-ethnic student groups decreased since 1985-86, rates for Black, Latino and white students have been on a steady rise since 2020-21.
We did not configure attrition rates for Asian, Native American, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and multiracial student groups due to the state’s data masking, which prevented IDRA from aggregating across counties to determine a statewide total.
Key findings from IDRA’s latest attrition study include the following.
- The Texas public school attrition rates increased each year since 2020-21.
- It has taken almost four decades for Texas to reduce the state’s attrition rate by a mere 11 points from 33% to 22%.
- Texas schools are failing to graduate more than one of every five high school students from the freshman class of 2019-20.
- Total attrition rates and those of the state’s largest groups (Black, Latino, white) are higher than the year before COVID-19.
- For the class of 2023, Latino students and Black students were more than twice as likely to leave school without graduating than white students.
- The attrition rate gap between white students and Black students has more than doubled between 1985-86 and 2022-23.
IDRA will publish the full 2022-23 study online in November 2024. The study includes methodology, historical statewide and county-level attrition rates and numbers of students lost to attrition by race-ethnicity and by sex.
Christina Quintanilla-Muñoz, M.Ed., is an IDRA research analyst. Comments and questions may be directed to her via email at christina.munoz@idra.org. Joanna Sánchez, Ph.D., is IDRA’s senior policy researcher. Comments and questions may be directed to her via email at joanna.sanchez@idra.org.
[© 2024, IDRA. This article originally appeared in the October edition of the IDRA Newsletter. Permission to reproduce this article is granted provided the article is reprinted in its entirety and proper credit is given to IDRA and the author.]