A family of graphs is called degenerate if it contains at least one bipartite graph. In this paper, we investigate the spectral extremal problems for a degenerate family of graphs $\mathcal{F}$. By employing covering and independent covering of graphs, we establish a spectral stability result for $\mathcal{F}$. Using this stability result, we prove two general theorems that characterize spectral extremal graphs for a broad class of graph families $\mathcal{F}$ and imply several new and known results. Meanwhile, we establish the correlation between extremal graphs and spectral extremal graphs for $\mathcal{F}$.