Arkansas

Limited Recovery, Continued Declines

Today’s edition of this newsletter reports on data from Arkansas. For a list of prior posts (including an introduction if you’re new to this series), see below.  We’re summarizing test score changes during the pandemic, and recovery sense. Here’s a top line comparison of the states with data so far.

Prior posts:

• Tennessee and Indiana

• Georgia

• Louisiana

• Delaware and West Virginia

• Introduction to the series!

Arkansas

The student outcome data used in this data brief come from the ACT Aspire summative assessment; more information can be found here. The ACT Aspire includes four proficiency levels: In need of support, Close, Ready, and Exceeding. In the summaries below, we define proficiency as students who were in the top two categories. Arkansas did not assess students in 2020 due to the pandemic.

Overall Trends

Overall proficiency in Arkansas fell in both English Language Arts (ELA) and math between 2019 and 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Proficiency rates fell about 5.4 percentage points in ELA and 12.2 percentage points in math. 

State test scores in Arkansas have shown very limited recovery since 2021. In fact, ELA scores have continued to decline in each year -- they are now down 7.6 percentage points from 2019. Math test scores have recovered slightly but remain 10.5 percentage points below 2019; they have actually declined between 2022 and 2023.

Trends by Race and Ethnicity

We were not able to access data by race and ethnicity in 2018. During the pandemic, test scores fell across all race/ethnicity student groups in Arkansas, and most have similarly all seen limited recovery. Of note, Black students have seen larger recovery from 2022 to 2023 than other groups in both ELA and math (although have lower scores overall.)

Trends by District-Level Income

Districts are divided into groups based on the share of students in poverty, as classified by the U.S. Census Bureau in their 2021 Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates program (SAIPE). In Arkansas, all groups showed declines in proficiency during the pandemic, and limited recovery.

As is commonly true across state assessment data, lower-poverty school districts have higher proficiency rates. 

Summary

Assessment data in Arkansas show very little recovery from declines in proficiency rates during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

If you are interested in other information out of these data — other analyses, data cuts, or visualizations — please reach out and we’ll see if we can help. We’ve only scratched the surface here, and a main goal of our work is to make these data more accessible to people who want to write about, analyze, or use them in their work. You can email us at statetestscoreresults@gmail.com or leave a comment below.