A Word on LEARNS Vouchers After the Fiscal Session

The Arkansas legislature's fiscal session is done, and the Governor got everything she asked for: more money for the LEARNS Act voucher program.

The Senate rejected a modest attempt to cap homeschool accounts and tie eligibility to academic accountability. Some lawmakers went so far as to make foolish, public vows to never cap the program at all. And we already know how well that worked out for Arizona.

But anyone paying attention can see the heartburn inside their own party. The Governor's loudest cheerleaders in the legislature can say what they want publicly. Privately, they see what we see, and what every critic of LEARNS predicted, in detail, before this ever became law.

Universal eligibility took effect this school year. And the numbers are speaking for themselves.

The Governor has proposed $309 million in general revenue plus $70 million in one-time reserve funds for FY27. That's $379 million that could have given every public-school teacher in Arkansas a $10,000 raise. Instead, it’s going to a program that is still growing. Six weeks into the FY27 application window, the state has already received 46,847 applications. That's 23% more than at the same point last year. On April 1, one of the legislature's loudest voucher defenders stood up and claimed demand had "hit that plateau." Seventeen days later, the Department of Education's own data told a very different story.

The trajectory is accelerating, not flattening. And we did not have to guess about how it would play out. There are clear examples.

Arizona's universal Empowerment Scholarship Account program, the model Arkansas adopted, has gone from $189 million in 2022 to $718 million in 2024, and is projected to top $900 million this year. Nearly five times the cost in four years. As of last year, between 71 and 82 percent of universal ESA recipients had never attended a public school. The program was not lifting kids out of failing schools. It was subsidizing tuition for families already paying it. And the private schools cashing those checks operate with none of the oversight, transparency, or accountability that Arizona's public schools must maintain.

Every one of those things is now happening, or is about to happen, in Arkansas.

In the program's first year, 95% of the money went to children who were already enrolled in private schools. The state is now paying tuition for the children of some of the wealthiest families in Arkansas. Meanwhile, our public schools just posted the steepest enrollment drop in two decades, losing nearly 9,000 students in a single year. Small rural districts in the Delta, the Ozarks, and the timberlands are losing students they cannot afford to lose, watching state dollars walk out the door with them, and bracing for the staff cuts and program eliminations that follow. The schools receiving these public dollars are not required to accept every student, take the same tests, publish the same performance data, or serve students with disabilities the way our public schools must.

More than two decades ago, the Arkansas Supreme Court held in Lake View that the state has a constitutional obligation to provide an adequate AND equitable education to every child in Arkansas. Every child. Not just the ones whose families could already afford the tuition.

We are not just heading in the opposite direction. We are running.

It is past time to reexamine how Arkansas funds its schools, from the ground up. Not by writing more checks to private schools that most voucher families could already afford. By making sure every public school in every corner of this state is adequately and equitably equipped to give every Arkansas child the education they were promised. The answer is not shipping kids out of their communities to less-accountable institutions. The answer is investing in the public schools here at home.

The legislators voting yes on more LEARNS money this session know all of this. They have read the same reports we've read. They have heard from the same superintendents we've heard from. They have seen the outcomes in Arizona.

The question is what it will take for them to stop prioritizing the subsidizing of students already attending private school and start doing right by ALL Arkansas students. KMI