Retraction, July 24, 2026. On May 11, 2026, The KSEdTribune published an article headlined "White Students Hit 60% in Kansas Schools." It reported that white students had fallen to exactly three in five of Kansas public school enrollment, and it traced that share, and the shares of every other race and ethnicity group, back two decades. Those statewide figures were wrong. We retract the article in full.

What we got wrong

The number in the headline was not a figure Kansas published. We built it ourselves, by adding up district-by-district race and ethnicity counts and dividing by a district-by-district enrollment total. Every statewide share, count, and trend in the article came out of that same arithmetic.

The method does not work on this source. Kansas withholds counts small enough to identify individual children, as student-privacy law requires. In the district-level enrollment file the article drew on, most Kansas districts have no published white-student count at all, and the same is true across the other race and ethnicity categories. Summing only the districts that do report, and dividing by an enrollment total that is far more complete, treats every withheld count as though it were zero. The result is not Kansas's white enrollment. It is a partial sum with a missing remainder we never measured, and the share we calculated from it was anchored to nothing published.

This is not a stale year or a rounding error. There is no corrected version of the number to put in its place. The article's premise, that Kansas's racial composition could be traced year by year from that source, was wrong from the first draft.

What we do not know

We do not know what share of Kansas public school students are white, and we are not going to guess. We are not substituting an estimate, a projection, or a reconstruction for the retracted figures, because none of those would be a measurement.

Everything in the original article that depended on the statewide series is withdrawn: the headline share, the year-by-year trend, the decade-by-decade comparisons, the counts of students gained and lost by group, and the charts drawn from all of it. Those charts have been removed from this page rather than left standing under a correction banner. The only chart on this page now is the one above, which shows the coverage gap that caused the retraction, not a replacement for the withdrawn figures. The district-level race comparisons rested on the same withheld counts and are withdrawn along with the rest.

What happens next

Kansas does publish this information. The Kansas State Department of Education reports enrollment by race and ethnicity at the state level through its Data Central portal and the Kansas Report Card. Those are published state values, and they are the right foundation for this story. The article did not use them.

We intend to report Kansas's demographic change properly, sourced from KSDE's published statewide figures, and to say plainly in that reporting how much of the district-level detail the privacy rules put out of reach. Until then, The KSEdTribune will not publish a statewide race or ethnicity figure for Kansas that does not trace to a value KSDE published.

The failure here is ours, not KSDE's. The state's suppression rules protect children and are working as intended; we read around them instead of respecting what they meant for the analysis. The article also carried a fact-check, and that fact-check tested the article's numbers against the same flawed sums that produced them, which is not a test at all. We are fixing how those checks are run.

Readers who relied on the original article should disregard it. We are sorry for publishing it.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.