Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, writes here about Arkansas’s ongoing efforts to destroy its public schools. Under Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the state has jumped into privatization.

Burris writes:

Arkansas sits eighth from the bottom on our 2026 report card’s rating of the states. And it is likely to fall further in the coming years as its legislature and Governor’s hostility toward public education grows, and its allegiance shifts further from its public schools to privatized alternatives.

Arkansas’s first charter law (1995) allowed only conversion charters — a way for districts to experiment, in keeping with the original vision. Four years later, the legislature authorized start-up open-enrollment charters, capped at twelve. In 2005, it raised the cap to twenty-four and lengthened authorization terms. In 2011, it added an escalator that bumped the cap by five every time the number of schools came within two of the limit, thus creating a cap in name only.

The move away from charters as a source of district innovation came in 2013, when the Arkansas Quality Charter Schools Act created the Charter Authorizing Panel as the primary authorizer, handling authorization, renewal, revision, and revocation, and gave the authority to a politically appointed commissioner. Over time, authorization periods grew from three years to twenty.

When Governor Hutchinson appointed Johnny Key commissioner in 2015 (even though Key did not meet the state’s educational experience requirements), the number of charter schools in Arkansas almost doubled.

The real embrace of privatization, though, came with Act 237, the LEARNS Act. 

That Act:

  • Eliminated the statewide cap on charter schools.
  • Created a revolving facilities loan fund for charter schools.
  • Created “transformation contracts” that hand district governance over to charter management organizations.

All of this despite the Division of Elementary and Secondary Education’s (DESE) own 2024 report that 46% of open-enrollment and conversion charters scored D or F, against 32% of public schools overall.

But the LEARNS Act did not stop there. It absorbed Arkansas’s modest voucher program into Education Freedom Accounts, at first with caps, but as of this year, all caps were lifted and universal eligibility kicked in.

Even though $277.4 million was appropriated, spending ballooned to over $326 million, with the legislature increasing funding to $379 million for 2026-27. Nearly 40% of the takers were homeschoolers or microschoolers. The state now funds unregulated and unsupervised education.

Not that there are sufficient safeguards on the private school sector taking voucher students. According to an investigation published this week by ProPublica, about 120 new private schools have opened in Arkansas in the three years since the state began handing families roughly $7,000 a year for tuition. Bill Kopsky of the Arkansas Public Policy Panel calls it “this whole new industry of pop-up, subprime private schools that have almost no regulation.”

Before LEARNS passed, Education Secretary Jacob Oliva promised there would be “accountability for the schools that participate.” What his Department actually gave itself was the power to run random financial audits, to make schools report tuition and fees, and to require schools to test students with an exam of their own choosing. Nothing about quality was included. Pressed to tighten the rules this spring, the Department declined again, and instead fiddled with what parents may buy — no more travel sports teams. Even that drew objections that it was too much government interference.

And what does the money buy? ProPublica found a school where students were put to menial labor and violence, whose owner was convicted of permitting child abuse, a felony. Shockingly, the school remains eligible for state money after a temporary stop.

The LEARNS Act also removed protections for teachers by repealing the Teacher Fair Dismissal Act and the Public School Employee Fair Hearing Act, leaving employees only notice of a termination recommendation and a hearing before the board, while displacing seniority and tenure as the basis for teacher dismissal.

It did raise the minimum teacher salary to $50,000. However, it is not surprising that our report card noted that Arkansas has a high rate of underqualified teachers, losing maximum points in that category. It is still in the lower 40% of states based on average teacher salaries adjusted by cost of living.

When it comes to funding its public schools, Arkansas hovered near the bottom, losing all possible points in three categories: funding, funding equity, and funding by ability to pay.

The state seems well on its way to competing with Florida and Arizona for last place.