State Rep. Jim Wooten (R-Beebe) filed a bill Wednesday that would require private schools that accept voucher funds under Arkansas LEARNS — the K-12 education overhaul law championed by Gov. Sarah Sanders in 2023 — to report the same information that public schools are required to share with the state.
Public schools must regularly relay data to the Arkansas Department of Education on academic performance, enrollment, staffing, finances, accreditation and other topics, much of which the state makes publicly available online. Such information about private schools, even if they receive taxpayer money in the form of vouchers, is not available to the public under current law.
Wooten said he also plans to introduce a second bill that would require all private schools receiving LEARNS vouchers to operate the same standardized tests as public schools. Though LEARNS requires participating private schools to test students, it allows those schools to choose which tests they operate, making it impossible to compare academic performance between schools.
“I just feel that students should be required to take the same test so that we can compare apples to apples,” he said in a phone interview Wednesday.
Wooten was a vocal opponent of LEARNS last session, warning fellow Republicans at the time that their vote on the bill would “come back to haunt” them. He was one of only a handful of Republicans to oppose the bill. But he said his modern proposals were “not intended to harm LEARNS in any way.”
“LEARNS is the law and we have to abide by it,” Wooten said. “But the thing is, we’re not giving the parents or the students a fair shake when it comes to being able to use the test scores to compare [schools].”
LEARNS vouchers — called “Educational Freedom Accounts” by the state — send public money to private schools to pay tuition and other costs. The vouchers can also be used by homeschool families for tutors, supplies, extracurricular activities and other expenses. More than 14,000 students are receiving vouchers in the 2024-25 school year, at a cost to taxpayers of about $6,900 per voucher or about $96 million total. Next year, as eligibility expands to all students in the state, that expense could balloon into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Although the public is paying for vouchers, we have very little information about who the program is serving or how students are performing. LEARNS requires the Arkansas Department of Education to compile a report on the program just once a year, and the annual reports released so far have been scant on details.
We don’t know, for example, the demographics of participating voucher students — how many are white, Black and/or Hispanic. We don’t know how many are from low-income households or qualify for special education. We also know next to nothing about their academic performance. The single reference to testing in the state’s most recent LEARNS report simply said a certain subset of students (the number of students is unclear) “were reported to average around the 50th percentile in both ELA [English Language Arts] and math.”
If the point of LEARNS is to give more choices to parents, Wooten said, they need to have good information about the private schools they’re considering opting into. He also said private school test results can give a misleading picture of performance if taken in isolation, since private schools — unlike public schools — can screen out students based on their GPA and other performance data.
“We talk about parental empowerment. I think they deserve to be able to compare,” he said. “Are they receiving a better education? Does a school pick and choose its student body? And most all private schools do that.”
