Organizers are racing to try to meet the signature threshold for an ambitious ballot initiative that would dramatically reorient the state’s K-12 education priorities and hold private schools receiving public funds to the same standards as those for public schools.
They still need thousands of signatures and face an uphill climb to meet the threshold by the July 5 deadline. We won’t know until the bitter end whether or not the group manages to get over the hump (more than a thousand volunteers are working at events across the state over the next 24 hours).
But I think it’s worth taking a moment to examine the stakes. The Arkansas Educational Rights Amendment would force the legislature to make real commitments to areas of educational need with a proven track record of improving learning outcomes. And it would force accountability on the governor’s voucher scheme, which is funneling tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer money into the pockets of private school families via a program with a long history of catastrophic failure in improving learning outcomes when states actually take the trouble to fairly measure and transparently report results at the private schools.
At a time when Republicans have total control of state government and Gov. Sarah Huckabee haughtily rules as if she has an infallible and possibly divine mandate, the education amendment would be the most comprehensive and far-reaching progressive policy victory in Arkansas since Medicaid expansion passed more than a decade ago.
The education amendment is somewhat unusual for a ballot initiative, which usually present relatively straightforward “up-or-down” questions on issues like the minimum wage, casinos, weed, etc. The ballot initiative currently collecting signatures to reverse the state’s abortion ban is like that. Yes, there are details — abortions are allowed up to 18 weeks and for certain exceptions such as rape, incest and saving the life of the mother — but the fundamental issue is a yes-or-no question about whether or not abortion should be legal.
If someone wants to quibble with the headline above and say that the abortion initiative would be the biggest win in terms of liberal priorities in the state, I wouldn’t argue much. But it’s different in kind. The education amendment lays out a very broad-reaching slate of priorities and then would force the Legislature to act. It doesn’t articulate just how lawmakers should go about implementing it. It just establishes certain areas that are an absolute priority — required by law — tying lawmakers hands. The ripple effects through every aspect of the budget would be massive. It would steer the state toward a massive policy project that state leaders don’t want to do. The Legislature has prioritized vouchers and tax cuts skewed toward the wealthy and ignored issues like access to pre-k. If the public votes for this constitutional amendment, it would mandate that the Legislature make new tradeoffs.
This is why Arkansas Republican lawmakers are not fans of direct democracy. The overwhelming majority of voters in the state are going to back the candidate with an “R” by their name. But that doesn’t mean they share their narrow ideological obsessions. They will happily vote for minimum wage increases by huge majorities even if their elected officials hate it. With the advent of one-party rule, the state’s government is not responsive to issues that voters care about that don’t align with doctrinaire right-wing dogma. That’s why you’re seeing more expansive efforts to legislate from the bottom up via ballot initiative. Pre-k is popular; vouchers are not.
The push to put the education amendment before voters comes in the first year of Arkansas LEARNS, the education overhaul backed by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and passed by the Republican supermajority in the Legislature last year. Among the law’s most controversial provisions was the creation of a voucher program to help families cover the tuition and other costs of private schools. The program began this year and will be phased in until all K-12 students in the state are eligible to apply starting with the 2025-26 school year.
One curious feature of LEARNS is that the accountability measures it establishes for private schools accepting vouchers are not the same as those for public schools. The amendment would seek to reverse that, insisting on the same accreditation and testing for all schools receiving public funds, as well as public reporting by school of the results. This would allow citizens to see how well the voucher program is working as compared to public schools and help guide parents.
In the early days of voucher programs, advocates wanted to arrange apples-to-apples comparisons of student performance because they thought the voucher students would perform better. But once voucher programs scaled up to statewide efforts, the results were awful: Students who switched from public school to private school via voucher saw their test scores plummet to an unheard of degree — akin to the learning loss associated with a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina or the COVID pandemic.
You might think such empirical results would give voucher advocates pause, but instead they shifted gears to trying to keep the test results secret or making comparisons impossible. Like many other new voucher programs in red states sweeping the country, Arkansas allowed private schools receiving boatloads of public money to arrange their own standards and tests, with none of the results made public. What could go wrong?
The irony here is that voucher advocates were often the ones screaming loudly about the need for accountability via testing in public schools, and pointing to those very results to disparage the quality of education in public schools. So you wind up with this very strange two-step: Voucher advocates will say something like, “these public school standards have led to lots of kids being below grade level in reading, let’s try something new.” But the measurement of how many kids are at grade level in reading is itself something we know via the standards, assessment and reporting! If voucher advocates claim to want to improve on these metrics, why wouldn’t we measure and report them at private schools, too?
Another objection you’ll hear is that religious schools with their own curriculum shouldn’t have to adhere to state standards. In practice, the Supreme Court has pretty clearly signaled that private schools retain their First Amendment rights of religious freedom even if they’re receiving public voucher money, and at the behest of Attorney General Tim Griffin, the amendment explicitly states that it would not usurp such federal rights. Religious schools, in other words, would be free to teach a religious curriculum. Nothing would stop such a school from offering class all about a Christian counter to the theory of evolution, for example. The only difference is that they would be subject to state testing — in addition to a lesson about Young Earth Creationism, say, students would also have to show that they have learned fundamental skills in reading, writing and math. And they would have to be able to answer questions on a test about standard science, even if they hold an alternative viewpoint they learned in school.
Finally, keep in mind that it would be up to the Legislature and state agencies to actually implement the amendment’s mandates. It strains credulity to imagine that the Sanders administration would ban religious instruction in private schools, and the amendment’s language would not force her hand.
The other argument from voucher advocates is that private schools already have accountability because they charge tuition, so parents can vote with their feet. If they don’t like the school, they can leave, so private schools have to win them over. The problem here is that there is zero empirical evidence that this is how parents are engaging with private schools in practice. Certainly private schools are motivated to provide good customer service for parents, but that doesn’t mean they are actually providing a high quality education. While there are good private schools, the evidence strongly suggests that vouchers often push kids into bad ones, and they wind up falling behind their grade-level peers at public schools. If that’s happening, wouldn’t we want parents to have that information? And wouldn’t we want citizens in the state to be aware given the gobs of taxpayer money being funneled into the program (private schools uncomfortable with accountability can always stop accepting vouchers)? What are voucher advocates afraid of? As a simple matter of fairness, it’s hard to understand why private schools shouldn’t be subject to the same standards if they’re on the public dole.
Here’s the biggest ticket item in terms of cost: The amendment would mandate the state to provide “universal access to voluntary, early childhood education for students three years old until they qualify for Kindergarten.” It would also require universal access to voluntary afterschool and summer programs (as a parent of two young children, it’s hard to overstate how valuable high-quality childcare is for working parents).
The fact that it would be voluntary is a key selling point, as some parents may prefer to keep their kids at home or use family caretakers.
The For AR Kids ballot committee backing the amendment has not yet released a cost estimate, but plans to release one if the measure makes the ballot. The cost will be significant. The organizers for the amendment say that ultimately these services pay for themselves and then some, pointing to studies suggesting a 9-to-1 return on investment. The idea is that something like pre-k improves outcomes in a durable way that helps students succeed as adults, making them more likely to be working good jobs and paying taxes to the state and less likely to cost the state money via something like the social safety net or incarceration.
These sorts of long-term return-on-investment models are always contentious, and opponents will point to their own studies that show a less rosy picture for pre-k. Rather than get into the weeds there, let’s simply grant the immediate gross costs will be quite substantial and force tradeoffs. But that doesn’t mean “we can’t afford universal pre-k.” Of course we can. We have simply chosen other priorities.
The grossest version of this argument was doled out last month by Education Secretary Jacob Oliva, answering an obviously prepared softball question about the amendment from a legislator in a committee hearing. (No surprise to see an agency head politicking in this blatantly partisan fashion under the Sanders administration.) Oliva said that the amendment would threaten the teacher raises in LEARNS. But one has nothing to do with the other! For crass political reasons, Sanders and company put the teacher raises (popular!) in the same LEARNS bill with stuff like vouchers (not so popular!) as a means to push the law through. But enacting universal pre-k would not force lawmakers to cut teacher salaries any more than tax cuts do. It’s all part of the same budget pie. Oliva was simply flailing around making empty threats.
State law requires a balanced budget. If the state enacts a pre-k program, it would have to make corresponding spending decreases or tax increases. If legislators say we “can’t afford” universal pre-k, they just mean they would rather use the budget pie on stuff they want. Tax cuts heavily slanted toward the rich, for example. Vouchers, for another. If voters mandate legislators to create a universal pre-k program along with other key educational services, they are expressing a preference for new priorities. This is why this amendment would be such a powerful win in a GOP-dominated state. Lawmakers might really want to zero out income taxes for the wealthy and not really care about pre-k. But if this amendment passed, voters would be overruling them.
The amendment would also mandate the Legislature to provide “assistance to children who are within 200% of the federal poverty line so that the qualifying children can achieve an adequate education and overcome the negative impact of poverty on education” and “services that fully meet the individualized needs of students with disabilities to allow them meaningful access to integrated education.”
Once again, these services will have costs, but if voters mandate the Legislature to prioritize them, it’s up to lawmakers to make the appropriate tradeoffs. Without a nudge from the people, it’s become pretty clear over the years that they would be content to ignore needs for these students in public schools.
Keep in mind that many private schools do not have the resources to fully serve the needs of disabled students. Tom Masseau, executive director at Disability Rights Arkansas, outlined the stakes for kids with disabilities:
One of the largest barriers to equitable access to education for individuals with disabilities is funding. The LEARNS Act, particularly the provision that permits families to withdraw funding from their local school district to supplement private school tuition, stands to devastate the fragile balance that exists in funding public education for children with disabilities. Already, federal and state funding for public education is not enough by itself. As a result, the shift of funding away from public education to private sources just deepens this deficit.
Public schools rely on the reality that children do not require identical funding. By way of example, if a school district receives $10 per student, the vast majority of students might cost $5 to educate. However, a student who requires a sign language interpreter, or requires personal assistance, might cost $15. If all students who cost $5 are permitted to withdraw the $10 designated to them, the school will experience an insurmountable deficit.
We hope this part of the proposal will ensure that the realities of children’s needs are met. Even before the LEARNS Act, very few parents and educators would disagree that special education programs are underfunded. Frequently, we encounter schools that might be willing but unable to provide services and supports that would successfully integrate a child into a general education classroom alongside their nondisabled peers; cost is an unavoidable barrier. While the state can fund some high-cost occurrences, those funds are not unlimited. We hope that such a provision would ensure that children with disabilities have the supports to access education based solely on their needs and not constrained by a school’s delicate budget.
The wonkiest part of the amendment, and one that I suspect most voters won’t fully comprehend, is also one of the most crucial: It would put the standards for “adequacy and equity” established by the landmark Lake View decisions in the state’s court system explicitly into the constitution.
For a deeper dive into the Lake View history, check out Baker Kurrus’s recent column. But here’s the gist: The Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that in order to ensure that all K-12 students had access to an adequate and equitable education in the state, it must follow a funding formula that was developed after extensive study. This ensured that poorer school districts at least had a minimum baseline of funding. Lake View has served as a foundation for education policy in the state for the last three decades.
Many Republican lawmakers don’t like Lake View for various reasons, but the big one is that it forces the state to spend a specific amount on K-12 education. Again, it’s all about priorities and tradeoffs: Right wingers would prefer to re-route some of that money into yet more tax cuts.
Lake View is stopping them from raiding that money for now, but the state Supreme Court has become rabidly conservative, and education advocates fear that Republicans have their eye on overturning it. That could give Sanders and company an open door to continue their efforts to defund public schools.
This all comes down to the vagaries of constitutional interpretation. The words “adequacy and equity” are nowhere to be found in the constitution. Rather, that was the court’s interpretation of this language: “the State shall ever maintain a general, suitable and efficient system of free public schools and shall adopt all suitable means to secure to the people the advantages and opportunities of education.” A future court could overturn that interpretation. But the amendment would put the language, mechanisms ,and standards of Lake View directly into the constitution, pre-emptively stopping the Supreme Court from undercutting that framework.
The organizers still have thousands of signatures to collect, with basically 24 hours left (they’re due by 5 p.m. but they’ll need time to do the final sorting and hauling). They are expressing confidence that it’s doable. I make no predictions.
But if the questions did make the ballot? I think it would win. If a Democrat backing this stuff runs against a Republican opposed to it in a red district, well, it’s Arkansas: The Republican is going to win. But if you isolate the issues and present them to voters, all this stuff is very popular. Take internal polling with a grain of salt, but people I trust who’ve seen those numbers say it’s about as popular as you’ll ever see.
So popular that it might be hard for even a well-funded opposition to overcome. That helps explain why billionaires like Jim Walton and Tik-Tok investor Jeff Yass have already poured in hundreds of thousands of dollars to try to stop it from even making the ballot. Opposition groups raised more than one million dollars, to go along with the free media they get from agency heads and lawmakers spinning and lying.
Meanwhile, the For AR Kids ballot committee pushing the amendment has raised less than $10,000. The odds have always been against them. But if this question actually goes before voters, it will be a political earthquake. And if the amendment passed, it would be an unthinkably massive victory for progressive priorities in a dead red state.
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