More than five years after the covid-19 pandemic began, the havoc it wreaked on American students and schools is alarmingly clear by nearly every measure. But there is one glaring exception: high school graduation rates.

Even as test scores cratered, public school enrollments plummeted, and chronic absenteeism — the percentage of students missing at least one-tenth of the school year — nearly doubled, graduation rates continued to rise steadily, as they have for decades. To look at the graduation statistics, it’s as though the pandemic never happened.

All signs indicate that many more of today’s students are falling behind academically but are still being allowed to graduate. What this means in practice is that more students will leave school underprepared for the world of college or work. School leaders need to act now to reset basic expectations — including consistent school attendance — for graduates, or pandemic exceptionalism will become the new normal.

The rise in chronic absenteeism should have lowered graduation rates, and it’s no mystery why. Missing a lot of school slows academic progress and makes it harder for students to meet their graduation requirements. Research from before the pandemic showed that chronic absenteeism was among the strongest predictors of on-time graduation. Whether we go by intuition or research, in districts where absenteeism is on the rise, we would almost certainly expect graduation rates to fall.

But the data we have gathered suggests the opposite. We ran the numbers for 22 states to examine chronic absenteeism’s effects on graduation rates before and after covid, and found that at the height of the pandemic, the effect became much weaker, only about half as strong as it was before the pandemic.

Our most conservative estimates indicate that if attendance still mattered as much as it once did, 100,000 fewer students would have graduated in 2022 alone. That’s more students than the total number of 12th-graders in New Jersey.

These students were disproportionately concentrated in more disadvantaged school districts, which is where chronic absenteeism increased the most. In 2022, graduation rates for relatively wealthier districts were almost two percentage points higher than they would have been if chronic absenteeism mattered as much as it had before the pandemic, while in relatively poorer districts, they were more than four points higher. Four points might not seem like much, but it means that more than 1 in 5 students who otherwise would have failed to graduate received a diploma.

Why did attendance become less important for graduation during the pandemic? Though it’s tricky to nail down a single cause, most won’t see a mystery here, either. During covid, policymakers and administrators made it easier for kids to make it through the sudden challenges of pandemic schooling. They posted materials and lessons online for absent students, expanded online credit-recovery programs for those who fell behind, and made assignments easier, retests common, forgiveness for late work a given and consequences for missed work slight.

Such temporary measures might have been reasonable while covid was sweeping the country. But five years later, it’s past time to take a hard look at whether pandemic-era policies should be kept in place when they create new avenues for students to learn less but still graduate.

In most districts, emergency changes have never been adequately rolled back because policymakers and administrators have not purposefully rebuilt basic expectations for the post-pandemic era. Students, parents and teachers are becoming accustomed to less rigorous post-pandemic schooling, where consistent attendance is not essential to graduating. The longer we wait to change that, the harder the reboot will be: The vast majority of this year’s graduates never experienced high school before the pandemic, but they, and graduates to come, don’t deserve an education built on lowered expectations.

Pandemic-era policies were not instituted to permanently change schooling or to allow more high school students, particularly more disadvantaged students, to graduate unprepared. But that is exactly what we’ll get unless education leaders reset expectations.

Nat Malkus is a senior fellow and deputy director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Sam Hollon is an education data analyst at the American Enterprise Institute.