Bearden School District

The Bearden School District in Arkansas is a small, rural district serving 446 students across just two schools: Bearden Elementary School (grades K-6) and Bearden High School (grades 7-12), with a 1-star rating and a 16th percentile state ranking that reflects significant academic challenges tied to extremely high poverty levels.

Bearden Elementary School is the district's standout, showing clear improvement and outperforming the high school in nearly every subject. It recently jumped from a 1-star to a 2-star rating, reaching the 36th percentile, and even exceeded state averages in 4th-grade Reading and English Language Arts. In contrast, Bearden High School struggles profoundly, especially in math—0% of students were proficient in Geometry and only 17% in Algebra, far below state averages. Despite this, the high school boasts a 92.8% graduation rate, above the state average, and an exceptionally low student-teacher ratio of 4.8:1, suggesting small class sizes that haven't yet translated into academic success. The elementary school has a more typical ratio of 11.2:1.

Key metrics reveal a district spending well above the national average—$14,138 per high school student and $13,742 per elementary student—yet academic proficiency remains low, with over 98.6% of students qualifying for free or reduced lunch. Science is a universal weakness, with only 20.4% of high schoolers and 29.6% of elementary students proficient, compared to the state average of 44%. The district showed year-over-year improvement from 2024-2025 to 2025-2026, driven by the elementary school's gains, but the high school's stagnant performance creates a "feeder problem" where better-prepared elementary students may soon outpace the high school's current curriculum. The graduation rate versus proficiency gap also suggests students earn diplomas without achieving grade-level mastery, raising questions about academic rigor.