Farmington - EdTribune AR - Arkansas Education Data

70 Arkansas Districts Report Exactly 95 Percent Graduation Rates. None of Them Are Real.

Thu, 21 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Seventy of Arkansas's 234 school districts reported exactly 95.0 percent graduation rates in 2024. Not 94.9 percent. Not 95.1 percent. Precisely 95.0.

That is not a coincidence. It is a data suppression threshold. When a graduating cohort is small enough that individual students could be identified from the numbers, the Arkansas Department of Education caps the reported rate at 95 percent. The actual rate for those 70 districts could be anything from 95.1 to 100 percent. The data does not say.

Nearly 30 percent of the state's districts have their true graduation performance hidden behind a regulatory wall.

The Spike in the Data

The histogram tells the story. District graduation rates spread across the spectrum from the 60s to the 90s, and then a massive spike at exactly 95 percent. That spike is not a cluster of districts performing at similar levels. It is an artifact of data suppression rules stacking dozens of different true rates into a single reported number.

The districts at 95 percent are overwhelmingly small and rural. Their graduating classes are often in the single digits or low double digits. When a class of 12 students has one non-graduate, reporting "91.7 percent" would effectively identify that student. So the state rounds to 95 percent and moves on.

The Trend Is Getting Worse

The number of districts capped at 95 percent has grown over time.

In years with available data, the count fluctuates but the trend is clear: more districts are falling into the suppression zone as rural populations decline and graduating classes shrink. In 2024, 70 districts hit the cap (nearly one in three).

Some districts have reported exactly 95.0 percent in every single year they appear in the dataset. For those districts, there is no trend to analyze, no improvement or decline to measure. Every year is reported identically, regardless of what actually happened.

What This Breaks

The suppression has cascading effects on how we understand graduation in Arkansas.

All-time highs and lows become meaningless. A district capped at 95 percent every year is simultaneously at its all-time high and all-time low. Every year qualifies as both. Statewide counts of "districts at all-time high" or "districts at all-time low" include dozens of these capped districts, inflating both numbers.

Rural performance is invisible. Arkansas has 234 districts, and the majority are small and rural. The 70 capped districts represent the state's rural backbone, communities where a single graduating class might be 8 or 15 students. Their actual performance is entirely hidden. Are small rural districts graduating every student? Or are they losing 1 in 10 and having that loss erased by the cap? The data cannot answer.

Comparisons are distorted. When a district like Mount Ida^↗ reports 69.2 percent, that number is real. Its cohort is large enough to be reported accurately. But its neighbor district, also small and rural, might report 95 percent because its cohort is slightly smaller. The gap between those two districts looks like 26 points. It could actually be 5 points or 30 points. Nobody outside the ADE data office knows.

By the numbers: 70 of 234 districts (29.9%) report exactly 95.0% in 2024. The suppression threshold hides the true performance of nearly a third of Arkansas school districts.

The Districts This Hides

Among the districts perpetually capped at 95 percent are names like Alma^↗, Corning^↗, Danville^↗, Elkins^↗, Farmington^↗, and Greenbrier^↗. Some of these are high-performing districts in growing communities. Others serve deep-poverty populations in declining areas. The cap makes them identical in the data.

Farmington, for example, is a growing district in Washington County near Fayetteville. It almost certainly graduates well above 95 percent of its students. But because its reported rate is capped, there is no way to confirm that from public data, and no way to track whether its rate is rising or falling over time.

What Could Be Different

Other states handle small-cohort suppression differently. Some suppress the number entirely, reporting it as "N/A" or "*" rather than substituting a fixed value. Others use ranges ("90-100%") that at least indicate the band of performance. Arkansas's approach of reporting a specific number (95.0) is arguably the least transparent option, because it looks like a real data point until you know to question it.

The 95 percent cap does not change Arkansas's statewide graduation rate of 89 percent. That number is calculated from the full cohort data before suppression is applied. But it does mean that roughly 30 percent of the district-level data (the data that parents, school boards, and researchers use to understand local performance) is functionally fictional.

Data source

Graduation rate data comes from the Arkansas Department of Education Data Center, covering four-year adjusted cohort graduation rates. District-level data is available for 2022 through 2024; state-level data covers 2016 through 2024.

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

95 Districts at Record Lows, 22 at Highs: Arkansas Splits in Two

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Bentonville^↗ added 370 students this year. It is one of 22 Arkansas districts at all-time enrollment highs. Ninety-five districts, meanwhile, just recorded their lowest headcounts in at least two decades. For every district celebrating a record, more than four are setting the wrong kind.

The 2025-26 school year brought the steepest single-year enrollment drop in Arkansas in at least 20 years: 8,916 students gone from the public system, a 1.9% decline that erased years of slow gains. Total public enrollment fell to 465,421, the lowest since 2006 and 14,011 below the 2020 peak of 479,432. Three out of four districts lost students. One in five lost 5% or more.

A Widening Ratio

The split between districts at record highs and those at record lows has been growing for years. In 2026, it hit an extreme.

In 2018, the ratio of districts at all-time lows to all-time highs was roughly 1:1. By 2021, it was 3.8:1 as COVID drove enrollment out of larger systems. A partial recovery in 2022-23 brought the ratio back down. Then it climbed again: 2.6:1 in 2025, 4.3:1 in 2026.

The 95 districts at record lows enroll 139,133 students, 29.9% of the state total. The 22 at record highs enroll 54,002. The shrinking side of the ledger educates 2.6 times as many students as the growing side.

Who Is Growing

Nine of the 22 districts at all-time highs are charter or virtual entities: Arkansas Connections Academy (5,780 students), Arkansas Virtual Academy (5,779), LISA Academy (4,320), Academics Plus (2,001), Exalt Academy (1,109), Graduate Arkansas Charter (807), Premier High Schools (748), Academies of Math and Science (606), and School for Advanced Studies-Northwest Arkansas (135). Together, these nine account for 21,285 students, nearly 40% of all enrollment in at-high districts.

The traditional districts at record highs are dominated by Benton County: Bentonville (19,944), Farmington^↗ (3,015), Pea Ridge^↗ (2,665), and Gentry^↗ (1,783). Northwest Arkansas is the state's growth engine. Census estimates put the Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers metro at 605,615 people in 2024, up 2.3% in a single year. Bentonville alone has grown 116.5% since 2005, from 9,210 students to 19,944.

The remaining traditional districts at highs are scattered small systems: Bauxite^↗ (1,757), Sloan Hendrix (820), Izard County Consolidated (645), Ouachita^↗ (552), Scranton (451), Armorel (458), and Nevada^↗ (433). Most are under 1,000 students, where a single new housing development or a small employer can swing enrollment.

The Delta and the Decline Streaks

The deepest losses concentrate in the Arkansas Delta and south-central corridors. Seven districts have declined every single year since 2015, an 11-year unbroken streak: Blytheville^↗, Watson Chapel^↗, Dumas, Osceola^↗, Camden Fairview, Lakeside (Chicot County), and Riverview.

Little Rock^↗ has lost 6,774 students from its 2008 peak of 25,738, a 26.3% decline to 18,964. Pine Bluff^↗ has lost 53.7% of its enrollment since 2005, falling from 5,738 to 2,658. Blytheville is down 60.4%, from 3,140 to 1,244. Watson Chapel, just south of Pine Bluff, has lost 56.1%, from 3,438 to 1,509. Forrest City^↗ has lost 53.1%, from 3,859 to 1,809.

These are not suburbs losing marginal students to charter schools. These are communities losing population. Pine Bluff has declined more than 30% since 2000 and ranks among the fastest-shrinking cities in America. Blytheville fell from nearly 25,000 people at its 1970 peak to roughly 13,000 by the 2020 census, a collapse that began when Eaker Air Force Base closed in 1992 and drove 7,500 people out of the area.

Small Districts, Big Vulnerability

More than half of the 95 districts at record lows enroll fewer than 1,000 students. Of the 144 districts statewide that fall below that threshold, a significant share are now at their floor.

Thirty-four at-low districts fall between 500 and 999 students, the range where each lost student carries outsized fiscal weight. At Arkansas's foundation funding level of $8,162 per pupil for 2025-26, a district of 600 that loses 30 students forfeits roughly $245,000, enough to fund two teaching positions.

"When districts lose students, financial solutions like staff cuts are complicated because lost students don't all go to the same school, aren't all in the same grade." — KUAF, March 2026

At the extreme end of percentage loss, Brinkley^↗ has shed 61.3% of its enrollment since 2005, falling from 950 to 368 students. Lafayette County is down 60.1%, from 993 to 396. Augusta has lost 58.5%, from 686 to 285. These districts are approaching the scale at which maintaining a full complement of grade-level instruction becomes structurally difficult.

Two Growth Engines, Two Diverging Trajectories

Northwest Arkansas, defined here as 15 districts in the Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers corridor, has grown 42.2% since 2005, from 60,712 to 86,317 students. The other 244 districts have collectively lost 15,699 students over the same period, a 4.0% decline. NWA's share of state enrollment has risen from 13.3% to 18.5%.

The two trend lines ran roughly parallel through the early 2010s. Then NWA kept climbing while the rest of the state flattened. Since 2020, the divergence has accelerated: the rest-of-state line fell below its 2005 baseline for the first time.

The separation is not only geographic. The charter and virtual sector, which includes nine of the 22 at-high districts, draws students statewide. Arkansas Connections Academy and Arkansas Virtual Academy together enroll 11,559 students with no geographic footprint. Their growth can hollow out brick-and-mortar districts anywhere.

The EFA Acceleration

The timing of this year's acceleration aligns with the third year of Arkansas's Education Freedom Account program, created by the LEARNS Act of 2023. In Year 1, the program capped participation at 1.5% of enrollment. In Year 2, 14,256 students received vouchers. This year, with universal eligibility, more than 46,000 applications were approved, at an estimated state cost exceeding $327 million, $50 million more than budgeted.

The program's direct impact on public enrollment is debated. KATV reported that of the 46,000 recipients, roughly 28,000 were already in private schools and 16,000 already homeschooling, with about 2,000 transferring from public to private. If accurate, the direct public-to-private transfer accounts for a fraction of the 8,916 net decline.

But the indirect effects may be larger. The voucher subsidizes families who might otherwise have enrolled in public school for the first time. And the fiscal drain is real regardless of where the students came from: the state is spending $327 million on students who are not in public classrooms, money no longer available for the foundation funding formula.

"95 percent of them already were attending private schools, so this was just an additional expense for the Arkansas taxpayer." — April Reisma, Arkansas Education Association president, KATV

Falling birth rates, post-pandemic homeschool persistence, and continued rural population loss all contribute. Disentangling the voucher effect from these structural forces will require several more years of data.

What Comes Next

The 4.3:1 ratio of lows to highs is a snapshot of a state pulling apart. NWA's growth is fed by corporate migration tied to Walmart and Tyson, forces that show no sign of reversing. The Delta's depopulation is generational and self-reinforcing: fewer students means fewer families means fewer employers means fewer students.

If the EFA program stabilizes at its current participation level, the marginal public-to-private transfer may slow. But if even a small share of the 44,000 existing recipients are families who would otherwise have entered public school, the denominator keeps shrinking. For a district like Brinkley, at 368 students and falling, the margin between operating and consolidation is not measured in percentages. It is measured in families.

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