Fort Dodge - EdTribune IA - Iowa Education Data

Iowa's Graduation Rate Recovered to 88%, but the Number of Districts Below 70% Doubled in 2024

Fri, 29 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

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

Eight Iowa districts graduated fewer than 70% of their students in 2024. A year earlier, there were four. Two years before that, three.

The doubling is not a statistical artifact. Several mid-size cities with cohorts large enough to produce stable rates joined the list for the first time in 2024, suggesting a real expansion of the graduation crisis beyond the handful of districts that have long struggled.

The list

District	Graduation Rate	Cohort Size
Choice Charter Schools	31.9%	47
Accountable to State	39.2%	125
Storm Lake	54.2%	192
Clayton Ridge	63.0%	200
Oelwein	66.7%	132
Ruthven-Ayrshire	66.7%	12
Burlington	67.4%	258
Fort Dodge	69.7%	267

Two of the eight are not traditional community school districts. Choice Charter Schools is a charter entity, and "Accountable to State" is a catch-all category for students in state-supervised settings. Ruthven-Ayrshire's cohort of 12 makes its rate inherently volatile. Four students graduating or not could swing it by 33 points.

That leaves five traditional districts with graduation rates below 70% and cohorts large enough to take seriously: Storm Lake, Clayton Ridge, Oelwein, Burlington, and Fort Dodge. Together, they represent more than 1,000 students in the 2024 cohort, of whom roughly 370 did not graduate on time.

Fort Dodge and Burlington

Fort Dodge is a city of about 25,000 in central Iowa. Its graduation rate has swung between 69% and 82% over the past six years, with no consistent direction. The 2024 rate of about 70% sits just above its 2022 low of 69%.

Inside Fort Dodge's numbers, students who receive special education services graduated at 41%. Students who are economically disadvantaged, who make up 66% of the cohort, graduated at 58%. Black students graduated at 47%, though the cohort of 19 is small.

Burlington, on the Mississippi River in southeastern Iowa, graduated 67% of its students in 2024. The rate dropped to 65% in 2023 before recovering slightly. In Burlington, students who receive special education services graduated at 41%, and students who are economically disadvantaged graduated at 56%.

Both districts share a profile: former manufacturing centers with higher-than-average poverty rates, where the graduation challenge is concentrated among students who are low-income and students who receive special education services.

The Clayton Ridge question

Clayton Ridge's presence on the list is notable because the district has an unusual composition. Its cohort of 200 is large for a district of its enrollment size, inflated by virtual program students. Clayton Ridge hosts Iowa Virtual Academy, drawing students from across the state.

In prior years, Clayton Ridge graduated between 69% and 84%. The 2024 rate of 63% represents a sharp drop. Whether this reflects changes in the virtual student population or broader challenges is not clear from the graduation data alone.

Oelwein's slide

Oelwein, a small city in northeast Iowa, has been on a steady downward trajectory. Its graduation rate fell from 89% (Class of 2020) to 67% (Class of 2024), a 22-point decline over four years. The cohort grew from 80 to 132 during the same period, suggesting the decline is not simply a function of smaller classes producing volatile rates.

A growing problem

The number of districts below 70% has doubled from the 2019-2023 average of about 4 to 8 in 2024. While Iowa's statewide rate returned to its pre-pandemic level of 88%, the tail end of the distribution has gotten worse.

At a state average of 88%, a district graduating below 70% is an extreme outlier, roughly 18 or more points below the norm. In these communities, approximately one in three students is not completing high school on time. The statewide recovery has not reached them.

Fort Dodge, Burlington, Oelwein, and Storm Lake did not respond to requests for comment.

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

The Special Ed Gap Is 18 Points -- Iowa's Most Persistent Equity Divide

Fri, 22 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

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

Special education students in Iowa graduated at 70% in 2024. The statewide average was 88%. The 18-point gap between the two is the widest equity divide in Iowa's graduation data after Native American students -- and unlike that gap, this one has barely moved.

Over six years of available data, the special education gap has ranged from a low of 17.8 points to a high of 19.6 points. There has been no year of meaningful progress and no year of meaningful regression. The gap simply persists.

A growing population, a frozen gap

The special education cohort has grown steadily, from 4,820 students in the Class of 2019 to 5,279 in the Class of 2024. That growth -- from 13.2% to 13.6% of the total cohort -- means more students are affected by a gap that shows no sign of closing.

Class of	SpEd Rate	All Students	Gap
2019	69.6%	88.3%	18.6pp
2020	71.4%	89.2%	17.8pp
2021	69.3%	87.8%	18.6pp
2022	68.0%	87.4%	19.3pp
2023	67.9%	87.5%	19.6pp
2024	70.3%	88.3%	18.0pp

The 2024 rate of 70.3% represents a modest bounce from the 2022-2023 trough, when special education graduation dipped below 68%. But the recovery only returned the rate to approximately where it was in 2019. Special education students, like the state as a whole, are back to pre-pandemic levels -- which were already inadequate.

Wider than every other gap

The special education gap exceeds every other measured equity divide in Iowa except for Native American students (20 points below the state average) and Pacific Islander students (19 points below). It is wider than the English learner gap (15 points), the Black student gap (12 points), the poverty gap (8 points), and the gender gap (2 points).

This ranking matters because it challenges assumptions about which groups face the steepest barriers. In public discourse about graduation gaps, race and poverty receive the most attention. The special education gap is larger than either and receives comparatively little scrutiny.

The district-level picture

The gap widens further in urban districts where special education cohorts are large enough to measure. In Des Moines, special education students graduated at 43% -- 28 points below the district average and 45 points below the state average. That rate comes from a cohort of 390 students, making it one of the most consequential special education outcomes in the state.

Burlington graduated special education students at 41%. Fort Dodge at 41%. Waterloo at 52%. Cedar Rapids at 52%.

Suburban districts fared better. Waukee graduated special education students at 81%. Southeast Polk at 83%. Western Dubuque at 93%. But these districts serve smaller special education cohorts, and the comparison makes clear how concentrated the challenge is in urban cores.

What the category contains

"Special education" is not a single population. The category includes students with learning disabilities, emotional behavioral disorders, autism spectrum conditions, intellectual disabilities, and physical impairments. A student with a mild learning disability and a student with a significant cognitive impairment are both counted in the same graduation rate, despite facing fundamentally different paths to a diploma.

Iowa's data does not disaggregate by disability type. The 70% rate is an aggregate that blends students who are on track to graduate with general-education coursework alongside students for whom a standard diploma may not be the most meaningful measure of educational success.

Some states report graduation by disability category or by educational placement (mainstream vs. self-contained). Iowa does not. Without that granularity, it is difficult to know whether the 70% rate reflects a broad failure across all disability types or a specific challenge concentrated among students with the most significant needs.

Nearly 1,600 students per year

At 70%, approximately 1,570 special education students in Iowa did not graduate on time in 2024. If the rate matched the state average, roughly 950 additional students would have earned diplomas.

With special education cohorts growing and the gap showing no movement, the absolute number of students affected increases each year. The gap is not getting worse in percentage terms, but it is getting worse in the number of lives it touches.

The Iowa Department of Education 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.

Storm Lake Graduates 54% of Students — Iowa's Lowest Rate Outside Special Programs

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

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

In Iowa, 88% of high school students earn their diplomas on time. In Storm Lake, just 54% do.

The 34-point gap between Storm Lake and the statewide average is not new, and it is not shrinking. Over the six years of available graduation data, the meatpacking town in northwest Iowa has never cracked 56%. In 2023, the rate fell to 46% before ticking back up to 54% for the Class of 2024.

What makes Storm Lake different from Iowa's other struggling districts is scale and demographics. This is not a tiny rural school with a handful of seniors producing a volatile rate. Storm Lake graduated a cohort of 192 students in 2024 — a mid-size class where the numbers are stable enough to mean something.

Where the language barrier shows up

Storm Lake's English learner graduation rate tells the clearest part of the story. Just 41% of LEP students graduated on time in 2024, compared to 73% statewide. Hispanic students, who make up roughly half the cohort, graduated at 51%.

The pattern is consistent across years. English learners in Storm Lake have not exceeded 39% in four of the last six years. For a district where the majority of students come from immigrant families working in the Tyson Foods and other meatpacking plants, the four-year graduation timeline measures something specific: whether students who arrived in the United States as teenagers can acquire academic English and complete all coursework before turning 18.

White students in Storm Lake graduated at 82% in 2024 — below the state average of 91% but far above their non-white classmates. The 31-point gap between white and Hispanic students within the same district dwarfs the statewide white-Hispanic gap of 10 points.

A town transformed

Storm Lake's demographic transformation is well-documented. What was once a predominantly white farming community became one of Iowa's most diverse cities after meatpacking plants began recruiting immigrant labor in the 1990s. The school district's graduating class now reflects that shift.

Pacific Islander students — a small but growing group in Storm Lake, many from the Marshall Islands — graduated at 16% in 2024, though the cohort of 19 makes the rate volatile. The Black graduation rate was 67%, based on a cohort of 12.

Students who are economically disadvantaged, who make up most of the cohort, graduated at 53% — essentially the same as the overall rate, confirming that poverty and language acquisition are deeply entangled in Storm Lake's graduation numbers.

Not alone, but the most extreme

Storm Lake is Iowa's lowest-graduating traditional district, but it is not the only one struggling. Burlington graduated 67% of students in 2024. Fort Dodge graduated 70%. Des Moines, the state's largest district, graduated 71%.

What separates Storm Lake is the persistence. Burlington and Fort Dodge have fluctuated above and below 70% over the data period. Storm Lake has been stuck in the low 50s for years, with a dip to 46% in 2023 marking its worst showing.

The two entities below Storm Lake on the state list — Choice Charter Schools at 32% and the catch-all "Accountable to State" category at 39% — serve specialized populations and are not traditional community school districts.

What the four-year rate misses

Iowa's graduation data tracks the four-year cohort rate: students who entered ninth grade and received a diploma four years later. For districts like Storm Lake, this metric may systematically undercount eventual graduation.

Students acquiring English often need a fifth or sixth year to complete requirements. Iowa does not publish extended-year graduation rates in its standard reporting, so it is impossible to say from this data how many Storm Lake students eventually graduate. The 54% rate is real, but it measures a specific thing — on-time completion — in a community where "on time" may be structurally misaligned with student needs.

Storm Lake 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.