New Report: Educational Freedom Grew and Test Scores Improved

Arkansas’s educational choice program got bigger, and the average test performance of the students got better. That’s the headline finding from a new University of Arkansas report analyzing the first year that the state’s Education Freedom Account program was available to every K-12 student.

For years, opponents of educational freedom have argued that smaller school choice programs can produce positive results, but those results will disappear once programs expand to serve everyone. The latest results from Arkansas tell a different story.

Arkansas’s Education Freedom Accounts, created through the LEARNS Act that Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed in 2023, give families about $7,000 per student to spend on eligible private educational expenses, including tuition, tutoring, services for students with disabilities, and more. During the 2025-26 school year, the program became available to every K–12 student in the state. Participation subsequently soared from 14,256 students the previous year to 44,524 in 2025-26 — a 212% increase.

Over the same period, the average percentile rank of EFA students on nationally norm-referenced exams rose. EFA students scored in the 62nd percentile in math and the 66^th percentile in reading, meaning the average EFA student scored as well as or better than about two-thirds of students in the national comparison group. The previous year, EFA students scored in the 57th percentile in math and the 59th in reading.

The researchers also broke down test results by school type. Homeschoolers, who make up more than a third of the program’s participants, posted the highest scores of any group. Homeschool students scored in the 71st percentile in math and the 76th percentile in reading on nationally norm-referenced exams. These strong test results align with the sentiment of the survey findings discussed in the report, which indicate that the most common reason parents applied to the EFA program, listed among their top three reasons by 81% of survey respondents, was to access better academics for their child.

Of course, the findings are not from a randomized controlled trial and are not causal. Still, they are consistent with a substantial amount of the research on educational choice. As EdChoice’s The 123s of School Choice shows, the positive academic impacts of educational choice programs are broad, spanning participant test scores, educational attainment, and other outcomes.

Yet what happens to the students who remain in Arkansas’s public schools? 27 of the 30 studies on what happens to public school students’ test scores once a choice program is introduced find statistically significant positive effects. Arkansas’s latest results appear to point in the same direction. Since 2024, the share of Arkansas public school students scoring proficient on ATLAS — the state test — has risen from 35% to 42%, a relative increase of more than 20%, with gains in math, science, and English language arts.

Each of these positive outcomes comes at a reasonable cost for taxpayers. The EFA award total value of $6,994 is around half of the $13,873 Arkansas spent per public school student in fiscal year 2024. The researchers themselves note that the EFA program is educating a larger share of students with a smaller share of state education appropriations.

The program is also serving many students with disabilities. For example, students with disabilities account for 16.3% of participants, compared with 15.19% of Arkansas K–12 students statewide. The report states that the true share of students with disabilities is higher because former participants in the state’s SUCCEED Scholarship program, which served many students with special needs, weren’t required to report their disability status again. 

Families are also returning to the program year after year. In the 2025-26 school year, 95.8% of K–11 participants who received an EFA the previous year returned. The 2026-27 application numbers indicate that many students will participate again, with the program receiving over 65,000 student applications and approving 55,649.

Fortunately, Arkansas’s supply of educational options is growing to accommodate rising student demand. In 2024-25, 126 private schools and more than 1,800 education service providers took part in the program. In 2025–26, 157 private schools and 108 microschools participated, and 3,200 vendors were approved. This was the first time microschools were counted separately in the report, and for the current 2026–27 school year, the program has approved 167 private schools and 156 microschools. Many of these schools and providers didn’t exist or weren’t approved to be part of the program only a few years ago, demonstrating that supply is responding to demand. 

The results from Arkansas provide proof of concept for what Milton Friedman argued more than 70 years ago in his 1955 essay “The Role of Government in Education.” Government can justly fund education, but as Friedman later put it, “Education spending will be most effective if it relies on parental choice and private initiative.” Now it is up to Arkansas to continue being a blueprint for other states to follow, so every family can be at the head of the table when it comes to determining their child’s education.