Palmetto State Education Coverage, Driven by Data
Education News & Data
Local education reporting from every corner of South Carolina, grounded in South Carolina Department of Education data.
Native American enrollment fell 49.6% since 2015, but most of the drop is a reporting artifact. A 2017 reclassification into multiracial moved 2,065 students into a new category in one year.
Thirty years after Abbeville, Florence 2 posted the largest graduation-rate gain in SC and crossed 90%, even as the 14 reporting Corridor of Shame districts still trail the rest of the state.
LEP students saw the steepest subgroup decline in SC, dropping from 80.3% to 77.8% as the overall state rate climbed from 81.0% to 86.7%.
Multiracial enrollment has surged 73% since 2017, adding 21,312 students to become the state's fourth-largest racial group and reshaping how schools count their students.
The Charter Institute at Erskine improved its aggregate graduation rate from 58.9% to 82.8% in six years, the largest improvement of any entity in South Carolina.
Berkeley, Horry, and Charleston all flipped from growth to decline in 2026, joining 14 other districts in a coordinated reversal.
Fort Mill School District maintains the lowest chronic absenteeism of any large SC district, with even its most disadvantaged students below the state average.
Black students in SC reached an 83.5% graduation rate in 2025, gaining 5.4 points in four years and narrowing the white-Black gap from a COVID peak of 8.8 to 5.8 points.
LEP enrollment surged 39% in seven years while total enrollment grew just 2.3%. Jasper County leads the state at 45%, and the growth spans coast to Upstate.
Students in foster care in SC have a 42.4% chronic absenteeism rate, up 13.4 points in four years, even as the foster care population dropped by nearly half.
Greenville County Schools posted a 90.6% graduation rate in 2025, the first time the state's largest district has crossed 90%, with broad gains across every subgroup.
Sumter has lost 3,610 students since 2015, a 21.3% decline, despite hosting one of the Southeast's largest military installations. The base's $2 billion impact isn't enough.
Economically disadvantaged students are chronically absent at 28.5% vs 12.1% for their peers, a 16-point gap that has not budged in four years of data.
South Carolina's graduation rate reached an all-time high of 86.7% in 2025, but youth in foster care graduate at just 44.8%, a 41.9 percentage-point gap.
South Carolina lost 41,256 Black students since 2015, outpacing white decline and reshaping the state's school demographics as Hispanic enrollment nearly doubled.
