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Iowa Reports Graduation Rates for Non-Binary Students, a Category Few States Track

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

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

Among the standard subgroups in Iowa's graduation data sits a line item that few states report: non-binary students.

Iowa began tracking graduation rates for students who identify as non-binary with the Class of 2022. The cohort was 15 students. By 2024, it had grown to 73. Their graduation rate was 84%.

The data point is small and volatile. It also reflects a reporting choice few states have made: breaking out graduation outcomes for students who do not fit the male or female categories.

What the numbers show

Class of	Graduation Rate	Cohort Size
2022	80.0%	15
2023	77.8%	36
2024	83.6%	73

Three years of data is not enough to identify a trend. The cohort is growing rapidly, from 15 to 73 in two years, which could reflect more students identifying as non-binary, better data collection, or both.

At 84%, non-binary students graduated above Black students (76%), English learners (73%), special education students (70%), Native American students (68%), and Pacific Islander students (69%). They graduated below the state average of 88%, females at 90%, and males at 87%.

A growing cohort

The most notable pattern is the cohort's growth. At 73 students in 2024, non-binary students represent 0.2% of Iowa's graduating class. That is still a small fraction, but the count has climbed each year, from 15 to 36 to 73.

Iowa City^↗ is the only individual district that reported a non-binary graduation cohort large enough to appear in the data: 11 students at a 91% graduation rate. In all other districts, the cohort was too small to report without privacy suppression.

Why this matters

Many state education agencies report graduation by male and female only. Iowa's decision to add a non-binary category reflects both a policy choice about data collection and a practical reality: some students do not fit the binary gender categories, and schools increasingly have systems to record that.

The existence of the data does not mean much by itself. Three years and 73 students do not support generalizations about non-binary students' educational outcomes in Iowa. The rate could change substantially as the cohort grows and becomes less skewed toward school districts with the earliest and most robust gender-identity data systems.

What the data does provide is a baseline. As the cohort grows, Iowa will build up a run of years that few states report at all. The 84% rate for 2024 becomes a reference point: not because it tells us everything about non-binary students in Iowa schools, but because it tells us something where many states report nothing.

Much of the national research on LGBTQ+ youth educational outcomes has relied on surveys rather than administrative records. Iowa's approach of including non-binary as a standard reporting category in official graduation data adds a measured outcome to a field that has leaned on self-reported data.

Context and caveats

The non-binary cohort of 73 students statewide means that a few individual students' outcomes can shift the rate by more than a percentage point. Applied to the 73-student cohort, the jump from 78% in 2023 to 84% in 2024 works out to roughly four additional graduates, meaningful for those individuals but too small a sample for confident trend analysis.

It is also unclear how Iowa defines "non-binary" in its data collection, whether it is self-reported by students, parent-designated, or recorded through some other mechanism. The growth of the cohort over three years could reflect changing norms around self-identification as much as any demographic shift.

The Iowa Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment about its data collection methodology for gender identity.

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

Three-Quarters Back: Iowa Has Recovered 76% from the COVID Absence Surge

Thu, 28 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The math is straightforward. Iowa's chronic absenteeism rate peaked at 25.6% in 2021-22. The pre-COVID baseline was 12.7% in 2018-19. The current rate is 15.8%. That puts Iowa 75.9% of the way back, three-quarters recovered from the worst attendance crisis in the state's tracking history.

The remaining 3.1 percentage points translate to roughly 15,000 students who are chronically absent today who would not have been under 2019 patterns. At the current pace of improvement (the state has been dropping about 3.3 points per year since the peak), full recovery to pre-COVID levels could arrive as early as 2025-26.

Iowa is among 15 states that formally adopted a goal to cut chronic absenteeism in half within five years. At 15.8%, it has already surpassed that threshold relative to the 2022 peak of 25.6% (half would be 12.8%). But the state set its benchmark against its own pre-COVID rate, meaning the target is approximately 6.4%, a level Iowa has never achieved.

The district picture: two Iowas

The statewide percentage masks a deeply uneven recovery. Of 325 districts with chronic absence data spanning both 2018-19 and 2024-25, just 142 (43.7%) have fully recovered to their pre-COVID rate or better.

The remaining 183 districts, 56.3% of the total, still have chronic rates above their baselines. Some by a point or two. Others by double digits.

Waterloo^↗ is the starkest example. At 33.5%, its chronic rate sits 9.2 points above the 2018-19 level of 24.3%, meaning the district has recovered roughly half of the way back from its 42.4% peak. At the other end, Iowa City^↗ has not just recovered but surpassed its baseline, dropping from a 28.0% peak to 10.3%, now 4.0 points below its 2019 level.

The denominator problem

Recovery percentages come with a caveat. Iowa's total enrollment declined from 494,333 in 2018-19 to 484,112 in 2024-25, a loss of 10,221 students. Some of the chronically absent students who "disappeared" from the data did not start attending; they left the public school system entirely. Homeschooling, private school enrollment, and families leaving the state all reduce the chronic absent count without improving any student's attendance.

Roughly 4% of the three-year reduction in chronically absent students (from 125,750 in 2022 to 76,535 in 2025) came from enrollment decline rather than attendance improvement. The remaining 96% represents genuine behavioral change: students who were missing school and are now showing up.

Why the last 24% may be the hardest

The students who returned to regular attendance first were likely the ones whose absences were most responsive to intervention: younger students whose parents could adjust schedules, families where the barrier was logistics rather than disengagement, and communities where the COVID-era disruption was temporary.

The students who remain chronically absent after three years of recovery may face more structural barriers: housing instability, work obligations in meatpacking towns, mental health challenges that the pandemic deepened rather than created. Iowa reports no demographic subgroups for chronic absenteeism, so the state cannot track whether its recovery is reaching its most vulnerable students.

Recovery from spikes tends to slow as rates approach their baseline. The last three points are harder than the first ten. Iowa has also never actually achieved the 6.4% rate that its "halve chronic absenteeism" pledge implies. The state may be converging on a rate it has never seen before, which is a different challenge than returning to one it remembers.

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.