Arkansas Teacher Retention 2025-26: A New Normal

In last year's post, we saw early signs that Arkansas teacher retention may have plateaued below pre-pandemic levels. New data for the 2025-26 school year confirms this finding. For the second straight year, roughly 12.7 percent of Arkansas teachers left the classroom - still almost 2 percentage points above the typical pre-pandemic rate. This leveling-off is despite high reported levels of teacher job satisfaction and early evidence that LEARNS salary raises improved teacher retention.

What's behind this plateau? In this blog post, we explore those components of the teacher labor market that are returning to normal - and one that is not.

Retention Rates Remain Low in 2025-26

In 2025-26, roughly 87 percent of Arkansas teachers returned to the classroom. This rate is unchanged from 2024-25 and remains over 1.5 percentage points below pre-pandemic levels. This raises a natural question: is higher teacher turnover the new normal for the state?

To understand what's driving these patterns, we sort teachers by their employment decisions between the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school years:

In 2025-26:

The statewide retention rate combines all Movers and Stayers, since both groups remain teaching in Arkansas public schools. But stability in this overall rate obscures key patterns on the ground.

Exits, Not Retirements

Teachers are exiting the Arkansas public school workforce at a higher rate than before the pandemic, but they're no more likely to retire. In 2025-26, only 2.7 percent of teachers retired. This mirrors last year's rate exactly and sits slightly below pre-pandemic levels.

Instead, exits among early- and mid-career teachers underlie increased turnover. This year, about 6.4 percent of teachers exited the Arkansas public school workforce. This is over 1 percentage point higher than before the pandemic - the same elevated rate we've seen for the past three years.

Switchers drive the remaining retention gap. In 2025-26, the rate of teachers switching to non-teaching public school roles dropped by .2 pp, inching back towards pre-pandemic levels. This decrease continues a slow but steady pattern of decline - the Switcher rate is now down .8 percentage points from its 2022-23 peak.

Last year, we discussed how the January 2025 expiration of Federal ESSER (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief) funds could lead to a dip in the Switcher rate, as some Arkansas districts may have used these funds for new non-teaching roles. That the Switcher rate remains elevated this year suggests some rigidity in districts' response to this expiration. Next year's data should reveal more of districts' adjustment to this funding loss.

Teachers Are Staying Put

In 2025-26, a greater share of teachers remained in the same school than at any time in the last five years. The Stayer rate rose to 77.1 percent this year, up .8 percentage points from 2024-25 and almost 3 percentage points from the low-water mark of 2022-23.

As more teachers stayed, fewer moved to new districts. Only 4.9 percent of teachers taught in a new district this year, a .8 percentage point decrease from 2024-25. This means that even as statewide retention held steady, those teachers who were retained were more likely to stay in their own district - a sign of growing stability within schools.

Geographic Shortage Area Districts Continue to Struggle

At the district level, retention recovery remains uneven. Despite improvements for some of the state's lowest-retention districts, most geographic shortage area districts still experience higher-than-average turnover.

The scatter plot below compares average district-level retention rates for the low-point years of 2021-22 and 2022-23 versus the three years of recovery since. Districts highlighted in red were identified by the state as Tier I Geographic Shortage Areas in either 2021-22 or 2022-23.

Only seven of the original geographic shortage area districts measured above-average retention over the last three years. Among the geographic shortage area districts with a prior retention rate below 75 percent, some gained significantly, other declined sharply, but none were able to catch up with the state average retention rate in the recent period.

Below, you can review our updated interactive tool to examine how 2025-26 retention looks in your district.

What This Plateau Means

Several years of post-pandemic data now reveal a new normal for Arkansas schools: lower retention rates, driven by higher exits among early- and mid-career teachers. But the most consistent pattern is that the teacher labor market continues to evolve. Teachers stay more and move less, switcher rates decline, and districts recover at uneven speeds.

Facing these challenges, Arkansas enacted major policies to bolster the teaching workforce - and they are showing signs of success. Early evidence suggests that LEARNS salary increases have improved teacher retention, particularly in rural and high-needs districts. Arkansas teachers are reporting high levels of job satisfaction and success.

But if teacher retention continues to plateau, Arkansas may need even more focused policies to address shortages. To inform these efforts, we will continue to examine the routes that teachers take into and out of the state's public schools. Better understanding these pathways can help us identify specific levers to help districts ensure they retain the teachers necessary to educate Arkansas students.