White families love vouchers the most, and other revelations from the annual AR LEARNS report

A new report about Arkansas LEARNS school vouchers is out, and it puts some sobering numbers on just how significantly Arkansas’ state-funded school-choice push is hacking into traditional public schools’ student bodies, and by extension, their budgets.

The biggest revelation is something many predicted but didn’t have the hard stats to prove until now: White students are significantly overrepresented when it comes to cashing in on voucher dollars, while Black and Hispanic students are underrepresented, a dynamic that certainly supports the progressive argument that “school choice” is the new path to segregated classrooms, as white students flee traditional public schools for more exclusive (read: whiter) options. 

This report capturing data from the 2025-26 school year marks the first time that race and ethnicity breakdowns have been included in Arkansas’ annual report.

An obvious caveat for LEARNS skeptics is that the 2025-26 report comes courtesy of the arguably pro-voucher academics at the University of Arkansas’ Department of Education Reform, which has long weathered credible criticism for its methods that tend to give more credit to charters, private schools and other non-tradition public school options than perhaps they are due. 

But the data included in the new report, an annual one required since Arkansas lawmakers passed the LEARNS Act in 2023, is quite useful for the hard numbers it offers on how many families are cashing in on vouchers and how they’re using the windfall. (If you’re looking for a leisurely weekend read, you can access all 107 pages here.)

The 2025-26 school year marked the first year that any and all students in Arkansas were eligible. Before last school year, eligibility was limited to certain groups, including new kindergartners, children of active military members and the like. You can read about previous years here. 

The 2025-26 school year saw Arkansas ponying up for 44,242 students to eschew public school options and claim voucher money instead. “Of these students, 26,688 (59.94 percent) attended private schools, 16,541 (37.15 percent) were homeschooled, and 1,295 (just under 3 percent) attended microschools,” per the report. 

The state of Arkansas doled out $301,352,895 to cover these 2025-26 vouchers, and the tab is only expected to rise. 

We’re skimming as fast as we can and will almost certainly find more hidden gems to examine, but so far, here’s what stood out:

1. When you get a voucher payout, you tend to keep it. “Retention from 2024–25 to 2025–26 was strong: 95.8 percent of EFA [Education Freedom Account] students previously in grades K–11 continued in the program,” per the report.
2. Homeschool families, famously lampooned for using their voucher dollars on things like horseback riding lessons, cotillion fees and American Ninja Warrior training, retain the now slightly abridged Educational Freedom Account-endowed freedom to keep making controversial spending choices with taxpayer dollars. Or, as the report says it, there are now “3,200 approved vendors and service providers offering instructional materials, therapies, enrichment, and tutoring consistent with program guidelines.” 
3. Students whose parents are well-resourced enough to put their children in private schools or teach them at home tend to do well in school. Nothing new here! But the report puts percentages to this phenomenon, suggesting that indeed, these kids test better on average than students in traditional public schools, a group that includes all comers, from rich kids to poor ones, coddled kids to neglected ones. A caveat here is that because voucher students don’t have to to take the same tests required of public school students, there’s really no way to compare apples to apples.

Not many students claimed vouchers and then tossed them back in the 2025-26 school year, per the report. Only 1,424 students ended up withdrawing from the voucher program to move to another state, go back to a traditional public school or move to a private school that was not accepting vouchers.

Today’s report also reveals new insight into how many students are leaving public schools in favor of private ones, likely thanks to the tuition help vouchers provide. A good amount, it seems. This chart shows how many “switchers,” a term for students who made the swap from public to private, claimed vouchers per grade.