Data-Driven Education Journalism for the Hoosier State
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School City of East Chicago lifted its graduation rate from 59.6% in 2017 to 90.0% in 2025, closing a gap with the state average from nearly 28 points to under 2.
Three years of improvement have closed less than half the gap opened by COVID, and each year's gains are shrinking.
Indiana's English learners now graduate at 92.4%, surpassing the overall state average of 91.8% after a 32-point climb from a 2017 trough.
The gap between students who are economically disadvantaged and their paid-meals peers narrowed from 11.5 to under 1 percentage point, but a broadened definition may be doing some of the work.
Indiana's kindergarten class is now 18% smaller than its senior class, a gap that nearly tripled in three years, locking in a decade of decline.
Hispanic students now outnumber white students in Seymour Community Schools, the fastest demographic shift of any Indiana district over the past 10 years.
Indianapolis Public Schools posted a 93% graduation rate in 2025, surpassing the state average for the first time after a two-decade transformation.
Indiana's second-largest county shed 8,789 public school students since 2016, a decline driven almost entirely by the collapse of its northern industrial cities.
Indiana's graduation rate hit 91.8% in 2025 — an all-time high and the second consecutive year above 90% — capping a 5.2 percentage point surge from a decade low.
Of 269 Indiana corporations that lost students during COVID, only 60 have returned to pre-pandemic levels. The state just hit a new post-COVID low.
73 charter corporations in Marion County enrolled 35,898 students in 2025-26, 1.8 times the 19,774 at IPS. The crossover came in 2020.
Indiana's majority-minority school corporations grew from 79 to 134 in a decade, reshaping suburbs from Avon to Seymour and manufacturing towns statewide.
Nine Indiana school corporations lost enrollment every single year from 2017 through 2026. Six suburban districts grew every year. Combined, the losers shed twice what the winners gained.
IPS lost a third of its students while outer suburbs hit record highs. Now the first-ring suburbs are declining too.
South Bend Community School Corp has declined every year for a decade, losing 5,829 students and falling from Indiana's 5th- to 11th-largest district.
