Out-of-staters misrepresent  Arkansas voucher data to champion school privatization

Last week, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute published an article that celebrates Arkansas’s private school voucher program. It offers up data from our state’s annual “Education Freedom Accounts” report as reason to believe that Arkansas families are giving up on public education. In particular, the article celebrates that, “Parents are no longer waiting for reforms to arrive or bear fruit.”

There are several problems with the article’s argument, but let’s start with the obvious: Arkansas families are not flocking en masse to public education alternatives.

The voucher program’s enrollment is growing because more already-enrolled private school families are now getting vouchers.

The article points out that enrollment in our state’s private school voucher program did double from Year