21 Louisiana Parishes Are at Their All-Time Highest Graduation Rate

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

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^↗ 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^↗ hit 93.2%, and Bienville Parish posted 93%.

Ascension Parish^↗, one of the state's fastest-growing suburbs, reached 92.1%. Ouachita Parish^↗, 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^↗ climbed to 88.5%, having started the dataset at 71.8% and hit a low of 64.3% in 2019.

Pointe Coupee Parish^↗, 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.

Nine Louisiana Parishes Hit All-Time High Chronic Absenteeism in 2025, Even as the State Improved

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Louisiana's statewide chronic absenteeism rate dropped 2.1 percentage points in 2025, the first improvement in two years. But that headline number obscures what happened in nine parishes moving in the opposite direction.

Winn Parish^↗, Franklin Parish^↗, St. Landry Parish^↗, Caddo Parish^↗, Vermilion Parish^↗, Evangeline Parish^↗, Lafourche Parish^↗, Richland Parish^↗, and Cameron Parish^↗ all recorded their highest chronic absenteeism rates on record in 2025, their worst year in the six years of available data.

Two in five students absent in Winn Parish

Winn Parish leads the group at 40.8%, meaning two in five students missed at least 10% of the school year. The rural North Louisiana parish of about 1,500 students was already above the state average before COVID at 24.3%, but the rate has climbed relentlessly since, from 24.5% in 2022 to 35.5% in 2023, 36.9% in 2024, and now 40.8%.

That's nearly double the statewide average of 22.5%.

Franklin Parish (31.4%) and St. Landry Parish (31.2%) also sit above 30%, alongside Caddo Parish at 31.0%. Four of the nine (Winn, Franklin, St. Landry, and Caddo) are now above the crisis threshold where nearly one in three students is chronically absent.

Caddo Parish: a recovery that evaporated

Caddo Parish tells the most instructive story among the nine. Home to Shreveport, the parish actually recovered to 19.6% chronic absenteeism by 2022, nearly back to its 2019 rate of 19.0%. It looked like a success.

Then the rates climbed every year: 27.9% in 2023, 28.2% in 2024, and 31.0% in 2025. Caddo's chronic absenteeism rate is now 12 percentage points above its pre-COVID level.

The parish had a recovery in hand and lost it: a microcosm of Louisiana's broader W-shaped attendance story, but more severe.

Diverging paths

What makes these nine parishes stand out isn't just that they worsened. It's that they worsened while 50 of Louisiana's 65 traditional parishes improved in 2025. The state's overall improvement was real and broad-based, making these parishes' continued deterioration all the more conspicuous.

The nine parishes span the state geographically: from Cameron on the Gulf Coast to Richland in the northeast, from Caddo in the northwest to Evangeline and Vermilion in Acadiana. There's no single regional explanation. Rural poverty, transportation barriers, and the lingering effects of hurricanes Laura and Ida may contribute in some parishes, but each faces its own combination of challenges.

Against the tide

The contrast between the state trend and these parishes raises a question that aggregate data cannot answer: what separates the 50 parishes that improved from the nine that got worse?

The LDOE's "Power of Presence" attendance initiative launched in 2025, and the state's overall improvement suggests it may be gaining traction. But these nine parishes, including some of the state's most chronically underresourced communities, appear to be falling outside that progress.

At 40.8%, Winn Parish is closer to having half its students chronically absent than to the state average. That gap isn't closing. It's growing.