Did Arkansas succeed in consolidating them?
I don't know if you can call it success. They still have 246 school districts as of last school year, many of which don't actually have all the state required courses and programs due to budget issues. The Arkansas Supreme Court has repeatedly declared the funding formula unconstitutional on equal protection grounds, beginning in 1982 but they finally worked that out (sort of..it's not so bad it's unconstitutional anymore) a few years back.
The thing about Arkansas is that the vast majority of the large districts are good to excellent. The rural schools, on the other hand, are still chronically underfunded, just not quite as badly as before. This is largely due to the way the funding is done. As here in Oklahoma, a large part of the property tax millage goes to the school district. In Arkansas, there is a state minimum millage that each district must levy (when I was in school it was 26.5 mills). That money goes into a pot at the state level and then gets divided on a per-pupil basis among the various districts across the state.
A district can, if they so choose and the voters approve, levy a higher millage and keep the entirety of the extra funds. In the larger cities, it tended to run around 40-50 mills total in the larger districts. The problem is that the smaller, more rural districts either choose not to ask for property tax increases or the residents of the district refuse. (the former is largely driven by the latter)
I went to high school in Fayetteville, which is a fairly large district by Arkansas' standards. There are three smaller school districts whose schools are within 10 miles of Fayetteville's high school (Farmington, Greenland, and Elkins) and have total enrollments of 2,000 or less. Fayetteville has around 8,000 enrolled, Farmington about 2,000, Greenland under 1,000 and Elkins is right about 1,000. I leave you to decide what you think about how well consolidation has progressed. I suppose it's better than the somewhere north of 3,000 districts they had a hundred years ago. (they had two big waves of consolidations that each eliminated over 1,000 school districts before 1950)
Sorry for the length, I didn't really intend to write a treatise on Arkansas' schools, but hopefully it might shed some light on our present conundrum.