Sarah Sanders sold her school voucher program as a way out for kids stuck in bad schools. In January 2023, weeks before she rolled out the LEARNS Act, she told Fox News Sunday that "no child should ever be trapped in a lifetime of poverty because of their bank account or their ZIP code."
Nearly four years later, Arkansas finally knows who is getting the money. This week the state's annual voucher report came out, and for the first time it broke the numbers down by race. As the Arkansas Times put it, white students are "significantly overrepresented" when it comes to cashing in on voucher dollars, while Black and Hispanic students are underrepresented.
That's not a guess from critics. It's in the 107-page report the state requires every year — written by the University of Arkansas's Department of Education Reform, a team the Arkansas Times calls "arguably pro-voucher." Even friendly researchers couldn't make these numbers look good.
Who got the money
Last school year was the first year every child in Arkansas could get a voucher. The state paid $301,352,895 to cover 44,524 students. About 60% went to private schools, about 37% were homeschooled, and about 3% went to tiny "microschools."
Here is who those students were, next to all of Arkansas's students, straight from the report's own table:
| Share of voucher students | Share of all Arkansas students | |
|---|---|---|
| White | 76.3% | 58.3% |
| Black | 4.6% | 17.8% |
| Hispanic | 6.4% | 14.6% |
Read that again. Black kids are almost one in five Arkansas students. They are fewer than one in twenty voucher students. Hispanic kids are about one in seven Arkansas students, and fewer than one in fifteen voucher students. White kids are under six in ten Arkansas students — and more than three in four voucher students.
If vouchers were rescuing kids "trapped" by their ZIP code, you'd expect the kids in the poorest, most overlooked neighborhoods to be first in line. Instead, the families who are cashing in look a lot more like the families who already had choices.
Most of them never left a public school
The race numbers matter even more once you see the other big finding.
The report counts "switchers" — students who actually left a public school to use a voucher. In grades 1 through 12, there were 40,117 voucher students. Only 10,358 of them came out of a public school. That's 25.8% — about one in four.
The other three in four were already in private school or already being taught at home. Their families were already paying for that choice. Now Arkansas taxpayers pay for it instead.
Last year's report measured it a different way — every participant, kindergartners included, by where they went to school the year before — and by that count 88% of voucher recipients didn't come from public schools. The two numbers aren't a straight comparison, but they point the same way. We wrote in August that Sanders' program was on track to cost $367 million while only 12% of participants had come from a public school. Former Little Rock superintendent Baker Kurrus put the question to the University of Arkansas's own education-policy researchers in August: how do kids who were already in private school get a better education just because the state is now paying the bill?
So the picture is this: a program that is mostly paying for families who already left public schools, and those families are disproportionately white.
What it costs everyone else
The report puts the voucher program's gross cost at $307.6 million once money reserved in accounts is counted. It tries to offset that with money the state "saves" when a student leaves a public school. Even after those savings, the report estimates the program's net cost to the state at $245.7 million to $253.5 million for one year.
To put that in perspective, the report says the voucher program is 8.1% of what Arkansas set aside for public schools and vouchers combined — for about 8.7% of the students. That money now follows a group of kids who are whiter than the state, and mostly weren't in public school to begin with.
And the public schools are still losing students. Switchers hit their peak in the middle grades — more than 29% of voucher students in fifth and sixth grade came from a public school. The report says each of those departures can reduce the state money a public-school district gets the next year. A special state rule for shrinking districts only partly offsets that loss.
Once families get it, they keep it
The report also shows the program locks itself in. Of the voucher students in kindergarten through 11th grade the year before, 95.8% came back. Only 1,424 students out of more than 44,000 dropped out partway through the year — to move away, go back to a public school, or go to a private school that didn't take vouchers.
That means this year's spending isn't a one-time cost. It's the new floor. The Arkansas Times notes the tab "is only expected to rise," and it has: lawmakers have already approved up to $379 million for the program this year.
Meanwhile, the money can be spent at more than 3,200 approved vendors and service providers. This is the same program that let families use voucher dollars on horseback riding lessons and American Ninja Warrior training before lawmakers reined some of that in.
The kids it doesn't reach
Sanders' "ZIP code" promise had a built-in problem: a voucher doesn't make a private school take your child.
Private schools in Arkansas can still turn students away. We documented how Sanders built this program on top of a scholarship for kids with disabilities — and how private schools don't have to take those kids, and often don't. When the schools get to pick, and the families who already had a private-school seat get to keep it on the state's dime, it shouldn't surprise anyone who ends up holding the money.
The report even tries to say voucher students score higher on tests. But as the Arkansas Times points out, voucher students don't have to take the same tests as public-school students, so there's no real way to compare. Families with the money to put their kids in private school or teach them at home tend to have kids who do well in school. That's not the voucher working. That's who was already there.
What the report shows
Sarah Sanders promised her vouchers would free kids trapped by their ZIP code. Her own state's report — written by researchers who favor vouchers — shows the $301 million program is 76% white in a state whose students are 58% white, while Black students make up 17.8% of Arkansas's students but just 4.6% of voucher students. Only about one in four voucher students in grades 1–12 actually left a public school; the rest were already in private school or homeschool, and Arkansas taxpayers now pay for it, at a net cost of roughly $250 million last year alone.
Source
Austin Gelder, "White families love vouchers the most, and other revelations from the annual AR LEARNS report," Arkansas Times, October 9, 2026.
