Usha Vance stumps for the LEARNS Act

Second lady Usha Vance was in town on Tuesday to tour a once-struggling public school and for a reception at the Governor’s Mansion with about 50 recipients of merit-based teacher bonuses of up to $10,000. Vance congratulated the winners of this cash prize launched under the LEARNS Act, Gov. Sarah Sanders’ school choice law passed in 2023 that has sent millions of taxpayer dollars to unvetted private schools. 

As she stepped on stage in the Mansion ballroom, Vance struck a demure presence. She’s modestly dressed, soft-spoken, and highly educated, having graduated from both Yale Law School and Oxford University. But she’s not afraid to put that soft presence behind Sanders’ aggressive privatization of Arkansas schools. 

Vance gassed up the audience of excited educators sipping lemonade and eating cookies and taking selfies in the Governor’s Mansion ballroom, telling them that Arkansas’ school privatization experiment was the only thing worth leaving her 3-month-old infant, Alec, for. “The only thing that could drag me away from him is to be here and see all the incredible work that you guys have done,” Vance said.

Vance spoke fondly of her morning spent at Glenview Elementary School, a public school in North Little Rock, that, according to the U.S. News & World Report, is struggling. But the school was meant to highlight LEARNS’ reported benefits to public schools, where all teachers now make a minimum of $50,000 per year and literacy coaches have been installed at the lowest-performing schools. The Arkansas Department of Education has said the North Little Rock school district, including Glenview Elementary, leapt from an F to C rating last year. 

“It had literacy specialists,” Vance crowed at the Governor’s Mansion. “Teachers who were so committed to teaching that they stayed with the same class for a second year after they moved up to the new level.”

Arkansas remains one of the most poorly educated states in the country, 36th according to U.S. News & World Report. Sanders’ policies suggest she thinks using taxpayer money to fund an exodus from public schools is part of the answer. And yet the words “private school” did not come up once in either Sanders’ or Vance’s remarks on Tuesday. Instead, Sanders touted having made the “largest investment in public education in Arkansas history,” with LEARNS. 

Undoubtedly, the most awkward thing spoken was when Education Secretary Jacob Oliva, whom Sanders recruited from the Sunshine State, confused Arkansas for Florida, another state gutting its public school systems. “When we started looking at recognizing the best teachers in the state of Florida,” he said, before continuing: “Excuse me, in the state of Arkansas. You guys are way better in the state of Florida. In fact, if you follow their Twitter, they keep trying to figure out what we’re doing in Arkansas because they are like, we need to be better than you,” he told the crowd, as they shifted nervously in their seats.

LEARNS is still new, and its impact is hotly contested. Recent data shows that it’s overwhelmingly white students who are using Education Freedom Accounts, the taxpayer-funded vouchers that students can use to pay for private school tuition or vendors for homeschool services including horseback riding lessons and cotillion fees, if they so desire.

While Sanders touts the accomplishments of LEARNS, pointing to higher test scores and better overall public school ratings, critics of LEARNS point out that private schools — the biggest recipients of the vouchers made available under the program — are not graded and the new A-F grading system for schools was designed under the LEARNS Act, muddying the baseline.  Arkansas Times reporter Milo Strain worked with ProPublica on an investigation showing that by contrast, there are almost no standards to start a private school in Arkansas.

Based on how many teachers showed up — and were snapping selfies in the Governor’s Mansion ballroom — it appears the merit-based bonuses are popular, of course. More than 12,000 educators have received over $50 million in bonuses. Money and parties are always smart ways to gin up support for LEARNS and silence detractors.

If you’re looking for a connection between education and Usha Vance, there was one as thin as a piece of paper. Vance keeps a very low profile. But according to her White House bio, her main beat as second lady is as a childhood literacy advocate. She runs a summer reading program called the Summer Reading Challenge. She has a podcast called “Storytime with the Second Lady,” during which Donald Trump raised new questions about his ability to read, and told Usha, who was then pregnant with her fourth child, that she was “in such good shape.” She smiled nervously in response.