New data on Ark. vouchers: More than 80% of new enrollees did not attend public school last year – Arkansas Times

On Monday, almost a month after a deadline required by state law, the Arkansas Department of Education finally publicly released its annual report on the state’s school voucher program, now in its second year. As we reported Tuesday, that report failed to provide a detailed picture of where things currently stand with the program, as it focused almost exclusively on the 2023-24 school year rather than 2024-25 (and the testing data it provided for last school year was almost non-existent).

In response to a Freedom of Information request, the department has now provided more specific data to the Arkansas Times on enrollment figures for the current school year.

The makeup of voucher students in 2024-25 is similar in many ways to last year — with the exception of a large wave of homeschoolers, who were not eligible in Year One.

Nearly 5,000 students who received vouchers in Year One continued into Year Two of the program. They were joined by more than 9,000 new enrollees who joined the program this year, for a total enrollment of 14,297. As with Year One, the overwhelming majority of the new enrollees — 83% — did not attend public school in the prior year.

The voucher program was created by Arkansas LEARNS, the education overhaul law signed into law by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders in 2023. The legislation’s backers sold LEARNS as a lifeline for poor families stuck in failing public schools. But with the program now in its second year, it’s hard to match that rhetoric with the numbers.

Here’s where the new enrollees this year came from last year. These percentages do not include the roughly 5,000 returning students who were enrolled in 2023-24:

The majority of new enrollees who got vouchers this year were either already enrolled in private school or had already been homeschooled. But that 83% figure also includes students who are just starting kindergarten (one of the eligibility categories for vouchers this year). We can only speculate how many of those kindergartners now receiving vouchers would have enrolled in private schools anyway even without the vouchers.

The proportion of last year’s enrollees who had been at public school the previous year was likewise quite small. In its first annual report, issued in September 2023, the education department stated the figure was 95%. The new annual report issued Friday updated the tally for the 2023-24 school year down to 82%, but the math behind that downward revision doesn’t seem to make sense. The education department has thus far not responded to requests for clarification on this point, which makes it difficult to compare this year’s figure with last year’s.

Either way, the program has to date mostly provided vouchers to students who are not moving over from public schools. These results fit a consistent pattern in other similar statewide voucher programs nationwide. Most of the public cash doled out winds up boosting the bank accounts of families who were never in the public school system to begin with. 

A more granular look at just how students wound up with vouchers reveals an even starker contrast between the rhetoric promoting LEARNS and the measurable outcomes. The number of students who received vouchers because they had previously attended low-performing public schools — a narrative that was a major selling point for the law — remains a tiny fraction of the program. The numbers did tick up this year, however, which may have been in part due to changes to eligibility in Year Two.

Eligibility breakdown

Next school year, all students in the state will be eligible for vouchers (though the number of actual recipients will depend on funding). In the first two years of the program, though, eligibility has been limited to certain groups.

In Year One, the following students were eligible to apply for vouchers: first time kindergarteners, students with a disability identified under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, students coming from an F-rated public school or “Level 5” district (the worst performing, according to the state), students experiencing homelessness, current or former foster care children, and children of active-duty military personnel. Students enrolled in the Succeed Scholarship Program, an earlier, smaller voucher program that mostly included students with disabilities, were also absorbed into the new voucher program last year.

In addition to students meeting last year’s criteria, the following eligibility categories were added this year: students enrolled in a D-rated school, students with a parent who is a military veteran or in the military reserves, and students with a parent who is a first responder or a law-enforcement officer.

Another change in Year Two: Homeschool families are now allowed to apply for vouchers to help defray the costs of designated educational expenses, but they still have to qualify via one of the eligibility categories above.

Here’s the breakdown by eligibility category for the 14,297 students currently enrolled in the program:

Note that the breakdown above includes all current voucher students — those who started in Year One and those who newly enrolled in Year Two. So, for example, some of the kids designated as “eligible for kindergarten” in the chart above were kindergartners in 2023-24 and are now presumably in first grade.

The biggest change is a sharp drop in the overall percentage of disabled students, from 57% last year to 40% this year. (Since the students from last year are included in this metric, that means that the proportion of the new enrollees is even lower.) This partly reflects the one-time impact of the Succeed Scholarship students being absorbed into the voucher program in Year One (roughly 23% of the disabled voucher students last year moved over from Succeed). It also may suggest that many of the disabled students who wanted vouchers already got them last year.

The percentage of students who were eligible because they were first-time kindergartners is about the same.

The biggest jump is in the children of military personnel, presumably due to expanding eligibility beyond active duty. That category made up just 4% of total enrollees last year and is up to 15% this year.

Including students from “D” schools as well as those from “F” schools seems to have helped an uptick in the low-performing-schools category as well. That’s still just 3% of the total number of voucher students, which amounts to more than 400 students. Last year, as of Sept. 20, there were just 55 students who met this category, less than 1% of the total enrollment at the time. 

Finally, the education department also provided the Arkansas Times with a school-by-school breakdown listing how many voucher students are enrolled at each school.

Here’s a full breakdown of private schools receiving vouchers in Year Two. And here’s the top ten schools with the most voucher students, along with the number of homeschool kids in 2024-25: