Summary:
In zip code 72209 (Little Rock, AR), there is only one high school, Graduate Arkansas Charter High, a charter school serving grades 9-12 within the Graduate Arkansas Charter district, which is ranked in the bottom 10th percentile of Arkansas districts.
Graduate Arkansas Charter High faces significant challenges, with a student-teacher ratio of 53:1—far above the typical high school average—and a graduation rate of just 46.7% for the 2024-2025 school year, compared to the state average of 90.1%. The dropout rate is a critical 47%, and 99.1% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch, indicating a student body with high socioeconomic needs. Academically, the school lags behind state averages in most subjects, with only 11.2% proficient in English Language Arts (state: 39.4%) and 18.3% in Biology (state: 42.7%). However, a notable exception is Geometry, where the school's proficiency rate of 30.0% actually exceeds the state average of 26.4%, and 12th-grade Geometry proficiency jumps to 46.2% versus the state's 10.8%.
The data suggests a "survivor effect," where the students who persist to upper grades are a more select group, inflating performance metrics for 11th and 12th graders. The school's state ranking has improved slightly from the 4th percentile in 2023-2024 to a projected 14th percentile in 2025-2026, but the pace of change is slow. With a per-student spending of $8,304, the combination of a high poverty rate, extreme student-teacher ratio, and low retention rates paints a picture of a school struggling to provide adequate support and instruction for its students.
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