Louisiana's white-Black graduation gap has been narrowing. The special education gap collapsed. The poverty gap sits under 5 points.

The white-Hispanic gap has done none of those things.

Hispanic students graduated at 72.8% in 2025, a rate that puts them 16.8 percentage points behind white students at 89.6% and 12.2 points below the state average of 85%. The gap has swung between 13 and 19 points over seven years without any consistent direction, and it currently sits wider than it was at its narrowest point in 2021.

A gap that refuses to close

The white-Hispanic graduation gap has been uniquely erratic:

• 2018: 17.8 points
• 2019: 18.8 points (widest)
• 2021: 13.2 points (narrowest)
• 2022: 18.3 points
• 2023: 18.7 points
• 2024: 15.7 points
• 2025: 16.8 points

The 2021 narrowing to 13.2 points looked promising, driven by a Hispanic rate that jumped to 74.7%. But the rate fell back to 69.1% in 2022, and the gap ballooned to 18.3 points in a single year. The pattern repeated on a smaller scale: improvement to 72.4% in 2024, a slight widening to 16.8 points in 2025 despite the Hispanic rate ticking up to 72.8%.

The volatility suggests a cohort that is both small enough and compositionally diverse enough to produce large year-to-year swings. It also suggests that no policy or programmatic intervention has established a durable downward trend in the gap.

The LEP connection

Hispanic students graduate at 72.8%. English learners graduate at 51.7%. The 21-point difference between these two overlapping but distinct groups is the key to understanding the Hispanic rate.

Many Hispanic students are not classified as limited English proficient. They may have been born in the United States, exited LEP status before high school, or been reclassified as English proficient. These students graduate at rates much closer to the state average. The students who remain LEP-classified through high school drag the subgroup rate down, because the four-year graduation timeline does not accommodate the time required for language acquisition.

The Hispanic rate is, in effect, a weighted average of English-proficient Hispanic students (who likely graduate above 80%) and LEP Hispanic students (who graduate around 50%). When the LEP share of the Hispanic cohort shifts, the overall Hispanic rate moves with it.

Where the gap is widest

The statewide figure masks extreme variation at the parish level.

East Baton Rouge Parish^↗ET graduated just 56.6% of Hispanic students in 2025. Orleans Parish^↗ET was at 61.3%. Jefferson Parish^↗ET posted 65.4%. These are Louisiana's three largest urban systems, and in each one, Hispanic students face a steeper challenge than the statewide data suggests.

The concentration of low Hispanic graduation rates in urban parishes likely reflects where recent immigrant families settle. Urban parishes tend to have larger LEP populations, and the connection between LEP status and lower graduation rates is the strongest predictor of Hispanic outcomes at the parish level.

Improvement without momentum

Hispanic students have gained 5.1 percentage points since 2018 (67.7% to 72.8%), a larger raw improvement than white students (4.1 points) or Black students (4.8 points). By that measure, the gap should be narrowing.

It is not, because the Hispanic trajectory includes deep setbacks. The 5.6-point drop from 2021 to 2022 (74.7% to 69.1%) erased three years of progress in one. The pattern suggests that the Hispanic subgroup in Louisiana has not yet found a sustained upward trajectory, even as other subgroups climb more steadily.

At 72.8%, roughly one in four Hispanic students in Louisiana does not earn a diploma within four years. The rate has improved from the 67-68% range of 2018-2019 to the low 70s, but the gap to white peers remains wide, volatile, and stubbornly resistant to the statewide gains lifting nearly every other group.

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)
library(tidyr)

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

grad_data |>
  filter(is_state == TRUE, subgroup %in% c("white", "hispanic")) |>
  mutate(rate_pct = round(grad_rate * 100, 1)) |>
  select(end_year, subgroup, rate_pct) |>
  pivot_wider(names_from = subgroup, values_from = rate_pct) |>
  mutate(gap = round(white - hispanic, 1)) |>
  arrange(end_year)

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