Ohio sees slight boost in high school graduation rates

On Feb 14, 2022

OHIO — There’s concern that while some states, like Ohio, saw boosts in high school graduation rates across the U.S., many others saw declines.

What You Need To Know

One full year after the pandemic and at least 20 states saw declines in high school graduation rates by one or two percentage points

Ohio had almost a 1% increase in high school graduation rates

Dr. Karen Stansberry-Beard believes the influx of new opportunities coming into the community like Intel, is providing a boost for students who can see themselves in such areas and can capitalize of it

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Chalkbeat took a look at the effects of the pandemic one full year after it started, and found is at least 20 states saw declines by 1-2% from 2020 to 2021.

Karen Stansberry-Beard, Ph. D., associate professor and educational administration program at Ohio State University said while looking at the declines, people have to consider the hurdles of the pandemic, including the length of the pandemic and lack of connectivity with peers and teachers.

“The biggest challenge, of course, initially was access and making sure students had good access to the online platforms and to make making sure that the teachers had the skill and were equipped to deliver instruction online,” she said.

In addition, she said students were “Hyper aware of social media.”

“So, there was this issue of attention and distractibility and keeping students focused,” Stansberry-Beard said.

She said those things, along with cyberbullying feeding into the mental health and well being of students were problems. Then, there was the great resignation of teachers.

According to the study, Ohio did not see the decline in graduation as 20 other states did, Ohio saw almost a 1% increase.

“I owe that in great part to the collaborations of communities, with schools and then of course with the universities who are doing especially this practitioner based work, where we are actually getting issues from the field, researching issues from the field, and then we are applying the research areas or what we call research streams to some of those matters that we know are always ongoing in the field,” she said. “So that, having that constant dialogue and that communication back and forth with practitioners is very beneficial for the communities in Ohio.”

Stansberry-Beard believes with the influx of new opportunities coming into Ohio like Intel and the Ohio research community, it’ll be encouragement for students to graduate and capitalize on those opportunities.