The consolidation of schools and districts has been one of the most widespread education reforms of the last century; however, surprisingly little research has directly investigated the effectiveness of consolidation as a reform strategy. We provide new evidence on this topic by taking advantage of a natural experiment in Arkansas that occurred when policymakers required the consolidation of all districts with average daily attendance of fewer than 350 students for two consecutive years. Using both regression discontinuity and instrumental variable models, we attempt to tease out the effects of state mandated consolidation. In general, we find that consolidation has a positive, yet practically insignificant performance impact on students from consolidating districts and a small negative performance impact for students in districts that merged with consolidating districts. School closure, a consolidation related phenomenon, is found to have a strong negative impact on affected students.