Connecticut Graduates 89% — and Can't Get Higher

Mon, 25 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Before the pandemic, Connecticut's graduation rate moved in one direction. From 2014-15 through 2018-19, the four-year cohort rate climbed from 87.0% to 88.3%, gaining about a third of a percentage point each year. The progress was modest but unbroken. It felt like a conveyor belt: slow, steady, eventually arriving somewhere near 90%.

Four years of post-pandemic data now suggest the conveyor belt has stopped. Connecticut's four-year graduation rate in 2024-25 was 88.9%, exactly where it was in 2022-23. Between those two years, it dipped to 88.4%. The year before that, it spiked to 89.6%. The four-year average since the pandemic: 89.0%, with a standard deviation of less than half a percentage point. The state is neither gaining nor losing. It is stuck.

The pre-COVID trajectory is gone

What makes the plateau notable is not the rate itself. At 88.9%, Connecticut sits above the most recent national average of 87%, reported for 2021-22. That is a respectable position. The problem is the trajectory.

Before the pandemic, each year's rate was higher than the last. The annual gains were small: 0.2 percentage points in 2016, 0.2 in 2017, 0.5 in 2018, 0.4 in 2019. But they compounded. Extend that trend line and Connecticut reaches 90% sometime around 2024 or 2025.

Instead, the state got a 1.3 percentage-point jump in 2021-22, then gave most of it back. Two consecutive declines, 0.7 and 0.5 points, erased the post-COVID bump before a 0.5-point recovery in 2024-25 brought the rate back to exactly 88.9%.

The pre-COVID pattern was consistent: four straight years of gains averaging 0.3 points per year. The post-COVID pattern is volatility around a fixed mean: up 1.3, down 0.7, down 0.5, up 0.5. The net change from 2022 to 2025 is negative 0.7 points.

Waterbury closed 18 points in a decade

The statewide flatline masks sharply divergent district trajectories. Waterbury, one of Connecticut's poorest cities and a designated Alliance District, graduated 67.9% of its four-year cohort in 2014-15. In 2024-25, that figure was 85.7%, a gain of 17.8 percentage points. The rate roughly tripled the state's own improvement over the same period.

West Haven followed a similar path, rising from 73.6% to 88.6%, a 15.0-point gain. Meriden gained 9.5 points. Ansonia gained 9.3.

These are Alliance Districts, recipients of more than $551 million in targeted state investment since 2012. The Alliance program, which directs additional funding to the state's 36 lowest-performing districts, produced a collective graduation rate gain of 4.4 percentage points between 2014-15 and 2018-19. Waterbury's gains have continued well beyond that.

But the gains at the bottom have been offset by erosion elsewhere. Stamford, which graduated 88.9% in 2014-15, fell to 79.5% in 2024-25, a 9.5-point decline that dropped a former above-average district below 80%. Torrington lost 7.4 points. Portland lost 7.7. These are not Alliance Districts. They are mid-tier suburban and small-city systems where graduation rates quietly deteriorated while attention focused on the urban cores.

The high-needs gap is nearly closed

Perhaps the most striking feature of Connecticut's graduation data is what happened between its two tracked subgroups. In 2014-15, the gap between all students (87.0%) and high-needs students (77.6%) was 9.4 percentage points. By 2024-25, high-needs students graduated at 87.3%, just 1.6 points below the 88.9% statewide rate.

The convergence was not driven by the overall rate rising. It was driven by high-needs students climbing 9.7 points while the overall rate gained only 1.9. High-needs students effectively closed a decade-wide gap in a decade, approaching parity with their peers.

Connecticut's "high-needs" designation includes students who qualify for free or reduced-price meals, English learners, and students receiving special education services. The definition is broad, which partly explains why the gap is small. But the trajectory is real: a 9.4-point gap compressed to 1.6 points across nine measured years, with the narrowing accelerating after the pandemic. The gap shrank by 1.7 points in just the last two years.

One caveat: Connecticut's free and reduced-price lunch eligible population expanded sharply in 2023-24, rising by 15.5 percentage points in a single year. The federal Community Eligibility Provision threshold dropped from 40% to 25%, making more schools eligible and broadening the pool of students classified as "high-needs." If that reclassification pulled more moderate-performing students into the high-needs category, it would mechanically raise the high-needs graduation rate without any student actually performing differently. The timing of the sharpest gap closure, 2023 to 2025, coincides with this reporting change.

Two-thirds of districts are above 90%

The distribution of 2024-25 graduation rates is heavily skewed toward the top. Of 135 districts with data, 89 graduate at least 90% of their four-year cohort, roughly two-thirds. Thirty-eight districts exceed 95%.

At the other end, 15 districts fall below 80%. Six are below 75%, including New Haven at 72.5% and New Britain at 71.0%. New Haven's trajectory is particularly concerning: it peaked at 80.0% in 2017-18 and has declined in every measured year since, losing 7.5 points. Hartford, by contrast, has been on the opposite trajectory, climbing from 68.8% in 2017-18 to 78.6% in 2024-25, a 9.8-point gain over seven years.

The concentration of high performance creates its own ceiling problem. When two-thirds of districts already graduate above 90%, the remaining room for improvement is thin. The statewide rate can only move meaningfully higher if the 15 districts below 80%, many of them large urban systems, make substantial progress. A district graduating 96% cannot contribute another percentage point. A district at 72% can.

What the ceiling means

The Connecticut State Department of Education framed the 2024-25 results as continued progress, noting that the overall Accountability Index rose from 70.8 to 71.8 and that 140 schools earned distinction, including 34 in Alliance Districts.

That framing is not wrong. The accountability index captures more than graduation rates, and gains in math, science, and attendance are real. But the graduation rate, specifically, has gone nowhere in four years.

"Through ongoing collaboration among educators, families, community partners, and district and state leadership, the CSDE is building on evidence-based strategies, such as dual credit expansion, attendance improvement, and equitable access to rigorous coursework, to ensure that every student is prepared for success." -- Connecticut State Department of Education, 2025

Whether those strategies move the graduation rate past 89% depends almost entirely on what happens in a handful of cities. Waterbury's 18-point climb over a decade demonstrates that large gains are possible in Connecticut's urban Alliance Districts. But New Haven's 7.5-point decline over roughly the same period shows the gains are not automatic. Stamford's 9.5-point slide shows they are not confined to high-poverty districts.

The on-time graduation rate, a stricter measure that counts only students who graduate within four years without extensions, tells a slightly different story. It fell sharply from 88.0% in 2018-19 to 82.7% in 2021-22 and has recovered to 85.9% in 2024-25, still below its pre-COVID peak. More students are completing high school, but more of them are taking longer to do it.

Connecticut graduates nearly nine of every 10 students who enter high school. That is an achievement worth acknowledging. Whether it can become 91 out of 100, or 92, depends on closing the distance between Waterbury's trajectory and New Haven's. Right now, those two paths are canceling each other out.