Davenport - EdTribune IA - Iowa Education Data

Des Moines Has Lost 5 Points Since 2019 — The State Capital's Graduation Slide

Fri, 08 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

This is part of the Iowa Graduation Rate series, examining trends in the Class of 2019-2024.

Des Moines Independent, the largest school district in Iowa, graduated 71% of its students in 2024. Five years earlier, it was 76%.

The decline has been steady and unrelenting. Not a single year since 2019 has matched the pre-pandemic rate. While Iowa's statewide graduation rate recovered to 88% -- exactly where it was before COVID -- the state capital has moved in the opposite direction.

The numbers land differently when you drive 15 minutes west. West Des Moines graduated 90% of its students. Waukee graduated 97%. Johnston graduated 97%.

The gap between Des Moines and its suburbs is not a new phenomenon, but it has widened. The distance between Des Moines at 71% and Johnston at 97% is 26 percentage points -- meaning a student's odds of graduating on time shift dramatically depending on which side of a district boundary they live on.

A metro divided

The Des Moines metro tells a story about geography and resources. The five districts serving the metro area produced graduation rates spanning 26 points in 2024:

District	Graduation Rate	Cohort Size
Johnston	97.4%	575
Waukee	97.1%	908
Ankeny	94.7%	893
West Des Moines	89.6%	737
Des Moines	71.4%	2,369

Des Moines serves more students than the other four combined. Its cohort of 2,369 is the largest in the state, meaning the district's struggles affect more students than any other single entity in Iowa.

Inside the numbers

Des Moines' overall rate masks even wider gaps among subgroups. Special education students graduated at 43% -- 27 points below the district average and 45 points below the state average. English learners graduated at 57%. Economically disadvantaged students -- who make up 83% of the cohort -- graduated at 67%.

The racial gaps within Des Moines are substantial. White students graduated at 77%, below the state average but well above the district's Black students at 67% and Hispanic students at 67%.

Males graduated at 68% compared to 75% for females -- a 7-point gender gap that mirrors the statewide pattern but is more pronounced in Des Moines.

How Des Moines compares to other cities

Des Moines' 71% rate is the lowest among Iowa's major urban districts. Cedar Rapids, the second-largest city, graduated 79%. Davenport graduated 78%. Even Waterloo, which faces many of the same demographic challenges, graduated 74%.

Iowa City, home to the University of Iowa, graduated 91% -- higher than the state average and 20 points above Des Moines. Council Bluffs, Sioux City, and Cedar Rapids all outperform the capital.

The comparison with Iowa City is instructive because it illustrates how much context matters. Iowa City's student body is shaped by a university community with high educational expectations. Des Moines serves the broadest cross-section of the state's urban population, including large communities of refugees and recent immigrants.

A trajectory with no inflection point

What distinguishes Des Moines' pattern is the absence of recovery. Other Iowa cities dipped during the pandemic and bounced back. Cedar Rapids dropped from 77% to 76% in 2021 and climbed to 79% by 2024. Davenport recovered from its COVID low. Sioux City bounced back to 87%.

Des Moines dropped from 76% in 2019 to 72% in 2020 and has stayed between 71% and 72% ever since. Four consecutive years of essentially flat performance at a depressed level suggests a structural challenge, not a temporary setback.

With a cohort of 2,369 students, the gap between Des Moines' 71% and the state average of 88% represents roughly 400 students per year who start ninth grade in the state capital and do not graduate on time.

Des Moines Independent did not respond to a request for comment.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

One in Three: Waterloo and Davenport's Persistent Absence Crisis

Tue, 05 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Correction (2026-05-09): An earlier version of this article reported the 2021-22 gap between Waterloo and the state average as 12.2 points. The correct value is 12.9 points.

In 2020-21, three out of every five students in the Davenport Community School District were chronically absent. The 60.5% rate that year was the highest ever recorded by a major Iowa district, a number so large it suggests not a spike in absenteeism but a fundamental breakdown in the relationship between families and school buildings during the pandemic's darkest months.

Four years later, Davenport has cut that rate nearly in half, to 33.2%. Waterloo is at 33.5%. Both have improved. Neither is close to acceptable. Together, these two industrial cities account for 7,846 chronically absent students, 10.2% of Iowa's total chronically absent population, from districts that hold just 4.9% of the state's enrollment.

Different paths to the same place

Waterloo's trajectory is a slow grind upward punctuated by a refusal to recover. The district's rate climbed from 21.0% in 2016-17 to 24.3% in 2018-19. It was already worsening before COVID. The pandemic pushed it to 38.5% by 2021-22, but the more alarming number came in 2022-23: 42.4%, the district's actual peak, a year when nearly every other Iowa district was already improving. Waterloo endured the longest consecutive worsening streak in the state, six years, from 2017-18 through 2022-23, before finally reversing direction.

Davenport's story is more volatile. The 60.5% spike in 2020-21 was followed by a sharp decline to 42.5% the next year, then a plateau at 42.5% again in 2022-23, and steady improvement since. The 33.2% current rate is still 10.2 points above Davenport's pre-COVID rate of 23.0%.

Both cities share industrial economies, higher poverty rates than the state average, and aging infrastructure. Both sit on rivers (Waterloo on the Cedar, Davenport on the Mississippi) in regions where the manufacturing base has been contracting for decades.

The numbers behind the numbers

Waterloo's 3,562 chronically absent students represent a population larger than many Iowa school districts. At 33.5%, the district is more than double the state average of 15.8%. The gap between Waterloo and the state average has persisted for all nine years of tracking data: 10.1 points in 2017, 12.9 in 2022, and 17.7 points today. The gap is widening over time, because the state has improved faster than Waterloo since the pandemic peak.

Davenport's 4,284 chronically absent students come from a shrinking enrollment base. The district enrolled 15,626 students in 2016-17 and 12,903 in 2024-25, a loss of 2,723 students, or 17.4%. Some families who left may have been the ones most likely to attend regularly, concentrating chronic absence among those who remained.

The long road back

At the current pace, Waterloo needs roughly four more years to return to its pre-COVID rate. Davenport needs three. Both timelines assume the improvement continues at its current speed, which it probably will not. The last few points of recovery are always the hardest.

Iowa reports no demographic breakdowns for chronic absenteeism, so neither district can determine whether the one-in-three rate falls disproportionately on Black students, English learners, or students whose families are economically disadvantaged. Both Waterloo and Davenport are among the few Iowa districts where white students are not the clear majority. Without that data, the interventions are necessarily generic: certified letters that go to every family the same way, regardless of whether the barrier is shift-work scheduling, transportation, or adolescent disengagement.

Iowa publishes district-level chronic absenteeism data through the Iowa Department of Education. The IAEdTribune is an independent publication and is not affiliated with the Iowa Department of Education.

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Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.