How to Fix LEARNS

Arkansas will spend up to $379 million on school vouchers this coming school year. That's $309 million for students already in the program, plus $70 million the governor asked to set aside from the surplus for those still coming. For that money, the state will not ask a single family whether they could afford the tuition on their own. It will not ask whether a single child ever sat in an Arkansas public school. And in three years it has never once permanently barred a school from cashing those checks.

Talk of repealing the voucher program will continue ahead of the governor's race, and count me among those who'd like to see it reversed. But I'm practical enough to temper expectations. Ballot efforts have come up short. The folks who wrote LEARNS aren't in a repenting mood, and those who passed it don't see the cliff they've pointed us toward. They're not going away soon, or all at once. So let's start turning the bus.

Let's start with where the money goes.

When LEARNS passed, we were promised accountability. What the Education Department gave itself was oversight related primarily to finances. It can run random audits, collect tuition figures, and require a standardized test the school picks for itself. Past that, what Arkansas asks of a private school is fire drills, immunization records, and an American flag with a flagpole.

It does not review curriculum. It does not review the background or the capability of the person running the school. Test results do go to the state, but they're pooled into a single aggregate number rather than published school by school, so no parent can look up how a particular school did. Schools promise to run background checks on employees, and nothing in the rules says those checks have to come back clean.

There were approximately 100 private schools in Arkansas in 2023. There are roughly 220 now, plus another 100 or so microschools, a category the state didn't track or fund before. Here is what that buys. ProPublica and the Arkansas Times reported last month on the Delta Institute for the Developing Brain outside Jonesboro, where the owner made a 10-year-old with autism scrub floors and walls and put a 13-year-old in a circle of his classmates, invited them to take turns hitting him, and joined in with a length of plastic pipe.

It went on for nearly 40 minutes. Three employees were in the room. Nearly half that school's students were on vouchers, and it had collected more than $300,000 in public money.

The department stopped the checks the day of the arrest in April 2025 of the owner, who pleaded guilty to permitting child abuse and related crimes. The department restarted the checks two days later.

In three years of the LEARNS program, the state has stepped in at two schools, and it has never permanently barred a single one. Asked this spring to tighten the rules, the department instead adjusted what parents are allowed to buy, banning travel sports teams, among other things. Horseback riding lessons stayed on the approved vendor list.

Next, let's ask about need. The application does not. Since the program went universal there's no income limit, no ceiling, no question about it anywhere in the process. I have yet to meet an Arkansan who believes a household making $200,000 a year needs help from the treasury with private school tuition. Means testing is not an attack on school choice. It's how nearly every other public benefit in this state already works.

The Democrat-Gazette reported last month that 10 of the program's private schools took in more than $60 million last school year. The top five are in Springdale, Little Rock, North Little Rock and Searcy. Those are hardly communities without access to options.

Third, let's make it about actual choice. The pitch was rescue. Get children out of schools that are failing them. So hold them to it, and require that a child attended a public school the year before. That isn't a new idea. The Succeed Scholarship, the program LEARNS absorbed, was built for students with disabilities and children in foster care, and required a student to have spent the prior full year in a public school. Those are the children most at risk of being left behind, and nobody ever had a problem with helping them.

Twelve percent of voucher participants reported previously attending a public school. The rest were already in private school, already homeschooled, or starting kindergarten. That isn't choice. That's reimbursement.

Fourth, same money, same rules. Public schools report test scores, attendance, discipline, finances and teacher credentials, and get graded on every bit of it. A private school taking the identical public dollar reports its tuition and grades itself. One school approved for this fall plans to pay a first-year teacher $25,000. The state minimum for a public school teacher is $50,000.

We start with oversight, because I'd like to see any supporter of LEARNS argue against it. Then let's ask what else the money could do. Arkansas closed the fiscal year with a $655 million surplus. Of that, $22 million would clear 1,500 children off the Arkansas Better Chance waiting list and raise provider reimbursements to three-quarters of market rate, according to Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families.

The Better Chance budget hasn't moved since 2011. Rather than reimburse wealthy families for tuition they were already paying, those dollars could put a 4-year-old in a classroom. That's where the states ahead of us on outcomes have been putting their money.

In April, the Senate president pro tempore was asked whether there was any ceiling on what this program should cost. He said he would never agree to capping it: "If it goes up $100 million a year, so it does."

We have the money. The policymakers in Little Rock have decided which Arkansas children are allowed to benefit from it. I refuse to accept that decision as final.

This column originally appeared in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on August 30, 2026.