Robust school choice has arrived in Arkansas. The March passage of the LEARNS Act created the Arkansas Children’s Education Freedom Account Program, which will provide education savings accounts (ESA) to families who wish to customize their child’s education. Starting in 2024, parents can use ESAs for tuition at a nonpublic school or for tutoring, curriculum, testing, uniforms, exam fees, technology or transportation.
This is a huge victory for parents and students, but the inclusion of school choice in the LEARNS Act sparked controversy. Legislative fights over school choice create an apparent collision between the status quo and putting students first. Yet school choice, in practice, does not follow the us-versus-them paradigm so often portrayed by the media. Education freedom offers compelling benefits to everyone in Arkansas.
Prior to LEARNS, Arkansas provided private school vouchers to students in foster care, students with disabilities and children of active-duty or reserve members of the U.S. military. In 2021, the legislature created another tax-credit scholarship program specifically serving low-income students. But Gov. Sarah Sanders and legislative leaders made it clear that education freedom should not be limited to a select few. Through the LEARNS Act, options become available to every student in Arkansas. Here’s why that’s a good thing.
The theory behind school choice contains two primary components. First, children are individuals who require education through diverse methods, and parents are best equipped to ascertain their individual child’s needs. If one thing is clear from the history of U.S. education, it’s that a one-size-fits-all education system cannot serve every student.
However, education reformers and advocates recognize that diverse education options remain out of reach for many families, especially low-income families. In the United States, a student is assigned to a public school based on where they live. For some students, that school is perfectly acceptable to their needs, but that’s not the case for all families. If they want to attend a different school, families can choose to move to a better school district or pay out of pocket for private or alternative schools. That’s something that affluent families do all the time but largely remains out of reach for low-income families.
Enter school choice. By tying education dollars to students, school choice programs help provide opportunities to the families who need them most. Every family is provided financial tools to seek out alternative education providers — if they want to. Arkansas’ program has a targeted eligibility component, meaning that students in foster care, students with disabilities and the children of active-duty or reserve members of the U.S. military get access first. By 2025, every Arkansas student will be eligible.
Empirical evidence clearly shows the benefits of this. Majorities of academic studies show positive effects of school choice on student test scores and educational attainment. School choice has been shown to increase students’ chances of graduating high school and continuing to college. A student using the Florida Tax-Credit Scholarship, which I myself received, for more than four years is 99 percent more likely to attend college. The LEARNS Act is attempting to bring those benefits to Arkansas students.
Furthermore, school choice also has the ancillary effect of incentivizing competition within the education system. Without accessible alternatives for families, public schools have no incentive to improve. In the last 50 years, inflation-adjusted, per-pupil public education funding has increased by more than 140 percent, yet achievement remains relatively stagnant. Comparatively, 25 academic studies show that when school choice is introduced, the students who remain in public schools improve as well, resulting from the competitive effect on schools.
Critics of the program have argued that school choice will “take money from” or “destroy” public schools. The evidence shows the opposite — public schools get better when students have a choice. But more fundamentally, the goal should not be to preserve any system of schools; the goal is to educate students and set them up for successful lives. The rhetoric that school choice opponents use betrays their intention to preserve the status quo and support a monopolistic system, regardless of whether those schools actually are serving students.
The educational and competitive benefits shown by school choice programs are essential, but ultimately the draw of school choice is that it puts control back in the hands of families, so that they don’t have to hope and pray they live in the right ZIP code.
Through the LEARNS Act, Gov. Sanders has given that control back to families and created powerful opportunities for students. Don’t listen to the naysayers; school choice in Arkansas will give families more options and help to improve the existing system.
Nathan Cunneen is a communications strategist at the American Federation for Children and a school choice beneficiary from Florida.
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