How Have High Schoolers Fared in the Aftermath of the Pandemic? New Evidence from CRPE Evidence Project Grantees

As we continue to grapple with the long-term effects of the pandemic on K-12 education, the need for high-quality research to support recovery is greater than ever. In 2023, to better understand the impact of the pandemic on high school-age students, CRPE awarded nine grants to researchers as part of its Evidence Project with support from the Walton Foundation. The funded projects varied in topic and geographic focus and included studies of student and teacher mobility in the St. Louis area, graduation and college enrollment in New York City, and high school resiliency in Alabama, among others.

Just over a year later, these projects have produced some fascinating and important findings. 

First, while not every impact of the pandemic was felt unevenly across groups, where there were disparities in groups’ experiences, they always widened existing inequalities. 

Second, while we all know that the pandemic negatively impacted student achievement, there are a range of other less-studied outcomes that took a hit, and the effects on these different outcomes do not all follow directly from one another.

Third, the pandemic’s effects on communities and teachers also had spillover effects on students, all of which are long-lasting and reinforcing in ways that will be difficult to undo.

Below, I briefly highlight a few studies that stood out to me and discuss their implications.

One study, led by Clare Buckley Flack, Kathryn Hill, and Xia Li at the Research Alliance for New York City Schools, examined high school graduation rates alongside college enrollment and persistence in New York City, the nation’s largest public school district. 

The study is one of the first to track Covid-19’s effects on college outcomes (though the authors acknowledge that they can’t separate the impacts of the pandemic from other things that happened simultaneously). Their report had several key findings:

• There was no immediate change in overall high school graduation rates, but there were sharp declines in two- and four-year college enrollment and first- to second-year persistence (meaning the number of students who stayed enrolled).
• While high school graduation rates did not decline, the rate of improvement from pre-pandemic years did slow, especially for low-income students.
• The effects on college enrollment were especially large for students with disabilities, for Black and Latine students, and for students residing in lower-income parts of the city, whereas college persistence rates were similar across demographic groups.

Overall, these findings emphasize that it’s important to look at a range of outcomes. Just because a short-term outcome like high school graduation is moving in one direction, perhaps aided by an easing of K-12 standards and graduation requirements during the pandemic, longer-term outcomes like college enrollment and persistence will not necessarily follow the same path. These findings also echo what we’ve seen in other research: the pandemic widened gaps in many, but not all, outcomes.

Cameron Anglum of Lehigh University (formerly of St. Louis University) led another study on student and teacher mobility pre- and post-pandemic in the St. Louis area. Their report found:

• There were sharp increases in teacher mobility in the years after the pandemic (the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years), echoing findings from other research.
• Teacher turnover within a school is associated with student turnover in that same school, and schools where more teachers return in a given year see more students return in the subsequent year. This echoes a large body of research finding negative effects of teacher turnover, though in this study, as in many, there may be other factors that cause both teacher and student mobility (such as school leadership, for example). Given that teacher mobility is widely known to be harmful for achievement, this is not surprising but nonetheless important to know.
• More teacher turnover was associated with worse student outcomes.

As others have found, there is a crisis in the teaching force, with increased mobility and decreases in teacher wellbeing. These findings from Anglum’s team point to the potential spillover effects of these issues on student outcomes, highlighting the reciprocal nature of Covid-19’s effects on students and teachers.

Auburn University’s David Marshall led a third study on understanding the impact of the pandemic on Alabama’s high schools. The project sought to identify which schools in Alabama “beat the odds” by outperforming recovery expectations based on demographic factors and how they did it. This study had several main findings:

•  The observed variables in their data (e.g., demographics, geographic variables, prior performance) did not explain why some high schools were outperforming expectations.
• Three factors may have explained the success of more rapidly recovering schools: positive teacher working conditions including a strong school culture, tight relationships with the external community, and supportive school leadership.
• There was also suggestive evidence that schools with a higher number of Latine students and higher levels of community education were recovering faster.

Though of course these explanations are not definitive, and we expect that the factors that drove school success post-pandemic were multifaceted, we appreciated this project’s efforts to uncover what was working and what was not in Alabama high schools.

Our full list of 2023 subgrants below speaks to a wide range of important—and often understudied—populations and outcomes that deserve research attention. We hope these findings are useful as policymakers and practitioners continue the hard work of supporting student success post-COVID.