It is no secret that the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted K–12 education in the United States. From sharp increases in chronic absenteeism to heightened dropout rates, the aftershocks are still being felt today. Did these various declines in student engagement unfold differently across different types of schools—particularly between charter schools and traditional public schools (TPS)? A new CALDER working paper addresses this question.
The researchers analyze school-level data from 38 states spanning the 2016–17 through 2022–23 school years. They combined these data with school and community characteristics from the Common Core of Data (CCD) and the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), covering roughly 3,400 charters and 64,000 TPS. Using four measures of engagement trends—attendance, chronic absenteeism, high school graduation, and dropout rates—the study compares pre- to post-pandemic changes in student engagement in charter schools with changes in TPS.
At the national level, the topline finding is straightforward: Student engagement declined in both charter schools and TPS, and on average, charter schools did no better than TPS in combating post-pandemic disengagement. In both sectors, average daily attendance fell from 95 percent to 92 percent in elementary and middle schools, and from 93 percent to 91 percent in high schools. Chronic absenteeism rates jumped by more than 75 percent in elementary and middle schools and by 40 percent in high schools. In fact, once school characteristics and state context are controlled for, the study finds no statistically significant difference between charter schools and TPS in how student engagement changed after the pandemic.
Yet these national differences mask substantial variation in charter outcomes from state to state. While charter schools fared significantly worse than TPS in limiting engagement declines in states like Illinois, New York, and Ohio (where drops in daily attendance rates were nearly double those in TPS), they performed significantly better in about half of the study states, like Florida and Louisiana. It is worth noting that, in Maine and Virginia, attendance rates in charters actually increased after the pandemic.
At the high school level, changes in graduation and dropout rates in TPS were relatively small, typically within 2–3 percentage points in either direction. Charter high schools, by contrast, show much wider swings across states. In roughly half of the states studied, charter graduation rates increased and dropout rates declined, while in the other half, graduation rates fell and dropout rates rose. In Oregon, for example, charter graduation rates rose by almost 8 percentage points and the dropout rate declined by nearly 4 percentage points, while in states like Tennessee and Arizona, graduation rates decline by around 4 percentage points and dropouts rose by 3–4 percentage points. This pattern illustrates greater volatility of charter outcomes from state to state, while TPS outcomes tended to shift more modestly and consistently.
The study also finds that schools within the same state tended to move together, particularly on high school dropout rates, suggesting that broader state conditions shaped engagement trends during the pandemic. School characteristics such as locale and student demographics explain about 10 percent of the variation in daily attendance rates, 15 percent in dropout rates, and roughly 22 percent in chronic absenteeism and high school graduation rates, regardless of sector. But differences between states account for an even larger share of the variation on some measures. State context explains roughly 33 percent of the variation in daily attendance and 18 percent in dropout rates, beyond what can be attributed to school characteristics. By contrast, state differences explain far less (8–10 percent) of the variation in chronic absenteeism and graduation rates. This suggests that some aspects of engagement, such as daily attendance, were especially sensitive to state-level conditions, while others, like chronic absenteeism and graduation rates, were influenced more by factors at the school or community level.
Taken together, these patterns suggest that charter schools function less like a single, coherent system and more like a collection of state- and city-specific sectors, producing wide variation in post-pandemic engagement outcomes. Charter schools are also more likely to be concentrated in urban areas with higher levels of socioeconomic stress, lower median income, and higher poverty rates—communities that experienced especially severe pandemic-related disruption. Additionally, they operate under different laws and conditions depending on the state. These factors may have amplified engagement challenges in some states while playing a smaller role in others. At the same time, TPS may have been subject to district-level policies and state-level accountability measures that smoothed engagement declines and reduced volatility across schools.
Further analysis may help explain this variation, perhaps if charter funding or the availability of charter authorizers makes a difference. Without a clearer understanding of why engagement outcomes diverged so sharply across schools and states, efforts to reverse disengagement risk repeating the same uneven results.
SOURCE: Zeyu Xu, Dan Goldhaber, and Rachel Dao, “Student Engagement in Charter and Traditional Public Schools Before and After the COVID-19 Pandemic,” CALDER Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (December 2025).
