School Vouchers: An Inexpensive Bait and Swap

School Vouchers: An Inexpensive Bait and Swap


When Gov. Sarah Sanders In her 2023 debut film, “Arkansas LEARNS,” she highlighted the school choice aspect of her education bill package. With state-funded school vouchers, she said, students can attend any school they want. “Our new Education Freedom Accounts enable parents to enroll their children in the school that is best for their family, whether public, private, parochial or home school,” Sanders announced.

This theme was addressed in the state’s first voucher report, in which the core primary goal was “to empower parents to make the best school choice for their child.”

When the governor unveiled the 2025-2026 budget in November, the state Department of Education reported that interest in the new voucher program was high. “This strong turnout is a testament to the power of school choice in Arkansas,” its website states.

Here’s the fallacy: the vast majority of people taking advantage of these publicly funded vouchers haven’t made a new choice. They chose private or home schooling long before LEARNS was adopted. About 82% of students who received vouchers in 2024-2025 simply continued to attend the same private or residential school they had attended the year before. The only difference is that now the state of Arkansas will cover some or all of the cost. Only 5% of voucher recipients for the 2024-25 school year left a traditional public school to try their luck elsewhere. Wow.

As the Legislature prepares to reconvene in Little Rock to consider the state budget, here are some key calculations about how much school vouchers will cost us in the coming years.

In 2024-2025, the state will spend about $90 million on about 14,000 vouchers, which works out to about $6,429 per voucher. (If you’re wondering why the total isn’t exactly 90% of the foundation funding, or $6,993.90, that’s because a student leaving a traditional public school lowers the amount of money the state pays that school. )

Based on the state’s 2023-24 numbers, 82% of Education Freedom Accounts awarded in the first year went to families who had already decided where their children would go to school. Among them, only 5% left traditional public schools and switched to private, parochial, or homeschooling options. We do not know whether many of the other approximately 13% of recipients attended private schools with or without vouchers.

This number will explode, and quickly, because for 2025-2026 there are no restrictions on who can receive a voucher, and the value of a voucher will increase from $6,993.00 to $7,533.00 if the House of Representatives’ endowment funding recommendation is complied with Senate Education Committees are put into effect.

For 2025-2026, the governor has budgeted $187.7 million for vouchers, but the actual cost will almost certainly be much higher. That’s why the governor allocated $90 million more from the state’s surplus reserves for vouchers in the next fiscal year. Total spending is expected to be up to $280 million in 2025-2026.

Even with an actual cost of $280 million for 2025-2026, I think the governor’s proposed voucher budget is low in the long run. As the voucher program expands, costs will skyrocket.

I make the following calculations based on a few assumptions: In the next few years, most homeschoolers and private school students will ultimately receive vouchers. And my conservative assumption is that the voucher program will not have a significant impact on school choice. Some parents who prefer private schools will end up at private schools because the subsidy could make the choice affordable. However, as the voucher program becomes universal, the total number of students with vouchers will be approximately equal to the current number of private and homeschooled students in Arkansas. Some homeschoolers may switch to private schools, but that doesn’t affect the overall cost.

In 2023-2024, the Arkansas Department of Elementary and Secondary Education website reported that Arkansas had 32,767 homeschoolers. This number could decrease somewhat if more and smaller private schools are created in rural areas. If 90% of those students receive vouchers, the state will spend approximately $222 million per year on vouchers for homeschoolers or former homeschoolers who choose to attend private school as a result of the voucher program.

Most private school students ultimately choose a voucher. The Arkansas Nonpublic School Association reports that its member schools had 21,240 students in 2023-2024. If 90% of them receive vouchers, that would be another $144 million expense for the state.

Assuming a 90% participation rate for out-of-state students, the total annual cost after ramp-up will increase to about $366 million, which will be adjusted upward each year as state endowment funding increases. I don’t think it will take most homeschoolers and private schoolers very long to take advantage of the subsidy, although that likely won’t happen until the 2026-2027 fiscal year.

The state’s data for the 2023-2024 school year shows 1,664 vouchers went to kindergarten students. If the same number of kindergarten students claimed vouchers each year in the future, there would be approximately 21,600 voucher recipients as these students progress through the system and new enrollments follow them at the same pace. Doing the math and assuming that the 1,664 figure includes about 5% of potential homeschoolers who were privately schooled, Arkansas will spend well over $400 million annually on vouchers by 2026-2027.

These are only estimates, but other states are finding that they have greatly underestimated the costs of their voucher programs. I don’t think it will be any different in Arkansas.

Another interesting cocktail party fact is the amount of subsidies a family would receive if that family had three children, with the first starting private school next year and the others starting every two years after that. Over the next 17 years, with a 3% annual increase in the voucher amount, this family would receive a subsidy of $365,557.68. Thing, thing, thing!!!!!

The irony is that about 75% of the families receiving the large subsidies live in central and northwest Arkansas, not rural areas. The state legislature has subsidized the richest parts of the state with hundreds of millions of dollars. Can you imagine being in a smaller city or rural area paying state income taxes and local property taxes to fund your local school district while the state pays tuition for families in Little Rock, North Little Rock, Fayetteville, Springdale, Bentonville and Rogers Private schools reimbursed? ?

Does it make sense to give tax dollars back to people in the wealthiest parts of the state when the poorest parts of the state are falling further and further behind? Is this just another tax cut, especially for the rich, disguised as an “education freedom account”?

Here lies perhaps the ultimate contradiction: The Arkansas Department of Education tells us that it is revolutionizing education in Arkansas. How come? By leaving responsibility for educating students to largely unregulated private schools, homeschools, and educational corporations that promote all sorts of silly programs. Essentially the state is saying that things will get better if it just gets out of the way.

The same scenarios are playing out in other states that have a few years of experience with their voucher programs. Arkansas copied the Arizona program. In this state, the original cost estimates were off by a factor of eight and went beyond the state budget. In these other states, as in Arkansas, most vouchers are claimed by students who have already attended private schools.

We were baited and switched. The bait was the choice of school. The move was a complicated transfer of wealth to parents in the wealthiest parts of the state whose children had long since left traditional public schools.

Sanders was right when she said when announcing her 2025-26 budget that the budgets reveal our priorities. Transferring wealth from poor and rural areas to subsidize the cost of private schooling and homeschooling for wealthier, more urban communities doesn’t seem like the right priority to me.

In Part 2, I will address funding priorities for prisons, maternal health, higher education, and economic development.

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