Twenty-one of Louisiana's parishes posted their highest graduation rate on record in 2025. That is roughly 40% of all parishes with sufficient data, and it spans the state from rural northeast Louisiana to suburban Baton Rouge to the Acadiana heartland.

The breadth of the improvement matters as much as its depth. These are not 21 parishes in the same region, with the same demographics, or with the same recent history. The list includes turnaround stories that climbed from the 60s and 70s to the high 80s, and established performers that pushed past 93%.

The top of the list

Vermilion Parish^↗ET leads at 95%, the only parish in the state above that mark. LaSalle Parish follows at 94.9%. Franklin Parish reached 93.8%, Calcasieu Parish^↗ET hit 93.2%, and Bienville Parish posted 93%.

Ascension Parish^↗ET, one of the state's fastest-growing suburbs, reached 92.1%. Ouachita Parish^↗ET, home to Monroe, hit 91.6%.

The middle of the list includes some of the most compelling turnarounds. Catahoula Parish reached 89.9%. Natchitoches Parish hit 89.3%. Morehouse Parish^↗ET climbed to 88.5%, having started the dataset at 71.8% and hit a low of 64.3% in 2019.

Pointe Coupee Parish^↗ET, a river parish that has struggled with some of the state's highest poverty rates, reached 81.3%, its best mark on record after dipping to 66.5% in 2021.

How far they have come

The all-time high labels gain meaning when placed against each parish's full trajectory. Several of the 21 parishes at their peak have climbed dramatically from prior lows.

The range between a parish's lowest recorded rate and its 2025 peak shows the extent of the improvement. Some parishes improved by 5-7 points from already-strong baselines. Others gained 15 or 20 points from sub-75% starting positions. The turnaround parishes are the more significant story: sustained improvement from graduation rates that once signaled systemic failure.

The few that went the other direction

Only two regular parishes sit at their all-time lowest graduation rate in 2025: Washington Parish at 83.2% and Winn Parish at 82.6%. A third entity, the Special School District, is at its low of 17.2%, but that district serves specialized populations and is not comparable to regular parishes.

Both Washington and Winn, despite being at their data lows, are graduating above 80%. Their "all-time lows" would have been above the state average a decade ago. The bar has risen across Louisiana, and even the weakest performers in 2025 are graduating four out of five students.

What the breadth suggests

When 40% of parishes are simultaneously at their highest point, the explanation is more likely systemic than local. Individual parish turnarounds, like Morehouse or Pointe Coupee, have specific local stories. But a pattern this widespread suggests state-level factors: accountability system changes, funding shifts, improved pathways to graduation, or demographic changes that put more students on graduation-ready tracks.

Louisiana revised its accountability system in 2024, expanding the weight of career education and college readiness pathways. The graduation rate gains in 2025 may partly reflect these broader credential-recognition changes. Whether that constitutes genuine improvement in student preparation or an expansion of what "counts" as graduating is a question the data alone cannot answer.

What the data does show: more Louisiana parishes are at their best graduation outcomes than at any point in the available record, and the improvement is distributed across geographies, demographics, and parish sizes.

Data source

Data from the Louisiana Department of Education. Analysis uses 4-year cohort graduation rates for the 2017-18 through 2024-25 graduating classes.

library(laschooldata)
library(dplyr)

grad_data <- bind_rows(lapply(c(2018:2019, 2021:2025), function(y) fetch_graduation(y, use_cache = TRUE)))

ath <- grad_data |>
  filter(is_district == TRUE, subgroup == "all", !is.na(grad_rate)) |>
  group_by(district_name) |>
  filter(n() >= 3) |>
  mutate(is_ath = grad_rate == max(grad_rate)) |>
  filter(end_year == 2025, is_ath) |>
  ungroup() |>
  mutate(rate_pct = round(grad_rate * 100, 1)) |>
  select(district_name, rate_pct) |>
  arrange(desc(rate_pct))

cat(nrow(ath), "parishes at all-time high\n")
print(ath)

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