In a state where 89.0% of students graduate high school within four years, Cahokia CUSD 187^↗ET graduated 56.7% of its 2025 cohort. That is the lowest rate among the 472 Illinois districts that published one. Male students graduated at 50.4%, female students at 63.2%.

Cahokia sits in the Metro East region of southern Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. Its 2025 rate is the second-lowest the district has posted in the seven years covered by the current series; the low point was 55.2% in 2024.

Down 10.8 points since 2019

Cahokia's rate fell in four of the six year-over-year changes since 2019:

• 2019: 67.5%
• 2020: 63.4%
• 2021: 61.6%
• 2022: 65.2%
• 2023: 60.4%
• 2024: 55.2%
• 2025: 56.7%

The uptick in 2022 did not hold. The rate fell to a series low of 55.2% in 2024, then recovered 1.5 points in 2025. Since 2019 Cahokia has lost 10.8 percentage points while the state gained 2.8, moving from 86.2% to 89.0%.

The gender dimension

The 12.8-point gap between female and male graduation rates at Cahokia ranks 24th among the 386 Illinois districts that published both rates in 2025, and first among the 94 of those districts enrolling 2,000 or more students. Statewide the gap was 3.3 points, with male students at 87.4% and female students at 90.7%.

Cahokia's female rate of 63.2% is 27.5 points below the state average for female students. Its male rate of 50.4% is 37.0 points below the state average for male students. Slightly fewer than half of the male students in the 2025 cohort, 49.6%, did not graduate within four years.

Only three districts below 70%

Three of the 472 districts that published a 2025 four-year rate graduated fewer than 70% of their cohort: Cahokia at 56.7%, the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice's district at 58.8%, which serves students in state juvenile justice facilities, and Shawnee CUSD 84 at 65.0%. Eight districts published no 2025 rate at all.

The count of districts below 70% has fallen sharply across the series: 10 in 2019, a peak of 23 in 2022, and 3 in 2025. As the distribution compresses upward, the districts still below that line stand further apart from the rest than they did at the start of the series.

District context and data limits

Cahokia enrolled 2,957 students in 2025, down from 3,365 in 2019, a decline of 12.1%. In 2025, 82.2% of its students were reported in the state's low-income category.

The current Illinois package publishes Cahokia's graduation rate but not a graduate count or cohort count for this district. The rate supports comparisons across years and districts, but it does not support a reconstructed headcount. The single-year moves should therefore be read as reported rate changes, not as an inferred number of students.

Cahokia's rate sits 32.3 points below the state average, the widest district-to-state graduation gap in Illinois in 2025. The state rate reached 89.0% that year, its highest in the 2019 to 2025 series.

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Data source: Illinois State Board of Education. Analysis covers the four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate for public school districts, 2019-2025.

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