The Louisiana Improvement Council's list of 35 indicators, designed to measure Louisiana's overall well-being, is trending slightly downward from the same period last year. Compared to the indicators released in August 2023, the state has made progress on about half of the indicators and regressed on the same number of indicators. Some have remained unchanged.
The findings come from CABL's Louisiana Factbook: Facts for the Future, an online resource that monitors the state's progress in five key areas.
Education & Workforce Economy Health & Wellbeing Infrastructure Environment & Energy
One year after the publication of the Factbook, 16 indicators show a downward trend compared to 13 indicators as of August 2023; seven have declined for a second consecutive year. Similarly, compared to 18 indicators from the previous year, 16 indicators are showing an upward trend; eight have shown progress for a second consecutive year, while three have remained unchanged.
Data for the various indicators are updated at different times throughout the year, so some indicators were not updated. For those indicators, the results recorded were consistent with the previous year's trends. Nevertheless, taken together, the indicators help paint a picture of Louisiana, assess the challenges it currently faces, and understand the priorities on which we should focus to build a better state.
“While there are certainly bright spots in this list of indicators, the overall message is that we are not making the progress we need to,” said CABL President Barry Irwin. “We should be improving or at least maintaining status quo on all of these indicators, but the fact that we are moving in the wrong direction on nearly half of them should be a wake-up call for all of us. This is especially true because Louisiana already ranks low compared to other states on many of these measures, including a number where the state has fallen.”
Over the course of CABL tracking, Louisiana has made progress on five of 10 indicators measuring education and workforce outcomes. Most encouraging is that Louisiana’s third-grade reading scores, an area that has received significant recent attention, have increased by six points since 2022. Over the same period, the percentage of economically disadvantaged students in grades three through eight who are performing at or above the mastery level has increased by four points.
While this outpaces the growth rate of the overall student population, low-income students overall still lag behind their peers by about eight percentage points.
Another notable point is the continued rise in educational attainment among the working-age population, just below 50 percent, while performance in three indicators has remained roughly stable, but in two indicators it has declined.
Economically, it's a mix of good and bad. Economically, people on the lower end of the income spectrum seem to be doing better: poverty rates have fallen and incomes have increased by nearly 3.5 percent, a slower rate than the rest of the country.
But broader indicators of the state's economic health point to worrying trends. Population loss and migration are continuing problems. Job growth has been nearly zero over the past decade, and while it rose 0.5% last year, that's much lower than the growth seen in nearly all Southern states and well below the U.S. growth rate of 1.7%. Despite recent improvements, Louisiana has fallen in the Tax Foundation's rankings of state business tax climates.
At the same time, while Louisiana continues to perform poorly on most measures of health and overall well-being, the state's violent crime rates and prison recidivism rates have both shown improvement.
“While we may say this year's results are only slightly lower than last year's, we cannot ignore the fact that we need to do better,” Irwin said. “We've created a sense of urgency, we've put in place new policies in areas like education, and we're making some progress. But we need to do the same in other areas, particularly in addressing chronic population decline, creating more jobs, and fixing our uncompetitive tax system.”
Each metric CABL tracks comes with an individual data point, an explanation of its significance, and an arrow that indicates whether the state has improved or worsened compared to the previous year. Each data point is supplemented with corresponding notes that provide additional context and recent trends. Overall, the goal is to help citizens and policymakers understand how our state compares to other states and where progress is being made.
CABL believes the broad range of issues contained in the Louisiana Factbook will help clarify what is impeding our progress, recognize where progress is being made, and highlight the challenges we must overcome to make Louisiana the dynamic, prosperous state all of our residents desire.
