Education Freedom Accounts:
the published record, drawn

How to read this page

Every figure carries one of five badges. The badge is the point: it says what kind of thing you are looking at before you read the number.

Every number on this page is built from the source tables by a script and served from a single data file; none is typed into a chart. The tables themselves are published below, in full, as CSV and as one workbook. Method, sources and known anomalies →

What this page found

Every figure below carries a badge saying what kind of claim it is. The tables behind every chart are published at the foot of the page as CSV.

The program today

2023-24 and 2024-25 from the DESE annual reports. 2025-26 approvals from the 2024-25 report's forward-looking Outlook section. 2026-27 approvals from records the Department released under FOIA, published by the Arkansas Advocate on 1 July 2026. Each tile carries its own badge.

Applications, approvals, active accounts

The gap between approved and active is small; the gap between applied and approved is not. Nothing published explains why an application is denied.

This chart mixes tiers, so each row carries its own rather than the section carrying one for all four. 2023-24 and 2024-25 are published annual-report figures. 2025-26 is published too, but in the 2024-25 report's forward-looking Outlook paragraph rather than as a result. 2026-27 is reported: the Department gave the number to the Arkansas Advocate, and it appears in no state document. Active-participant counts exist only for the two closed years.

The sector flipreported

Homeschooling was not an allowable use of the funds in year one. Two years after it became one, homeschool families are nearly half the programme. This is the largest single change in its composition and it has gone almost entirely unremarked.

2024-25 from the annual report. The 2026-27 split is reported, not published and not obtained: an Arkansas Department of Education spokesperson gave the approval counts to the Arkansas Advocate, which printed them on 1 July 2026 (Antoinette Grajeda, “Applications show gaps between Arkansas vouchers and private school tuition rates”). No state document contains them and no record was released for them — the article's separate freedom-of-information request covered the tuition and school-application material further down this page, not these counts, and conflating the two would claim a receipt that does not exist. The counts are stated as of 26 June 2026, a date derived from the article's “as of Friday” and its publication date rather than stated outright. 2023-24 is omitted: homeschool was not an eligible use that year. See the absence register for why no state publication carries these.

Where participants came frompublished

The programme's own reports answer the central policy question directly: in 2024-25, 12% of participants had attended an Arkansas public school the year before. A third of the file has no prior-school entry at all — shown here as its own slice rather than redistributed, because redistributing it would be a guess.

2023-24 report Figure 3; 2024-25 report Figure 4. The 2023-24 report used a two-way split (public / not public); 2024-25 used six categories. They are not directly comparable and are drawn separately for that reason.

Who qualified, and under which doorpublished

As eligibility widened, the composition changed underneath it. Disability qualification fell from a majority of participants to about a third — not because fewer disabled students joined, but because far more of everyone else did.

2023-24 report Figure 2; 2024-25 report Figure 2. Categories a family could qualify under; families may satisfy more than one. Homeless is reported only as “<1%” in 2024-25 and is left unplotted rather than estimated.

What it was budgeted, and what it becamepublished

Each dot is one figure from one primary document — an appropriation act, a Legislative Council transfer, the Governor's budget letter, or an annual report. For 2025-26 there are five of them, and they do not agree.

Every point is tied to a named document; hover for the citation. A widely quoted 2025-26 award total of $326.1M is deliberately absent — it traces only to a September 2025 internal report shared with reporters and legislators, never published, so it cannot be sourced here.

What the money boughtpublished

Tuition is 81% of the dollars but 46% of the transactions. Supplies are the mirror image: 22% of all transactions, 8% of the money. Dollars and transactions tell different stories about what this programme is used for, so both are drawn — on their own scales, side by side.

2024-25 report Table 3. The fourteen category rows sum to $84,506,226 and 180,602 transactions — both reconcile exactly to the report's stated totals. reconciles

Two programmes wearing one namepublished

Split the same spending by who did it and the programme stops being one thing. Private school families spend 97% of their money on tuition. Homeschool families spend 39% on supplies, 21% on curriculum, and 21% on tuition to somebody else. Almost nobody reports this, because it sits in two tables the summary table hides.

2024-25 report Tables 4 and 5. Each reconciles exactly to its own stated totals, in dollars and in transaction counts. reconciles

Six recipients, then 1,971published

In 2023-24 the state could name every non-tuition recipient of voucher money: Staples, ClassWallet, The Toggery, Especially For You Designs, Khakis. One year later the appendix runs to forty-nine pages.

2023-24 report Table 3 (six line items, one of which is “private school tuition” in aggregate). 2024-25 report Appendix B, spring transactions only.

Every recipient, rankedpublished

1,971 named recipients sharing $43.2m. The median one received $483. The top 25 took half of it. Best Buy is the fourth-largest recipient of Education Freedom Account money in Arkansas, ahead of every private school but three.

2024-25 report Appendix B, pages 39–87, extracted programmatically. The 1,971 rows sum to $43,185,261 against the appendix's own printed total of $43,185,234 — a $27 gap consistent with whole-dollar rounding of 1,971 cent-level values, not a missed row. source rounding

The twenty largest recipientspublished

2024-25 report Appendix B, spring transactions only. Names appear exactly as printed in the data; display capitalisation only is normalised. No attempt has been made to join these to the participating-schools table — several names differ between the two (“Baptist Prep”, “Central Arkansas Christian Schools, Inc.”) and a fuzzy join is known to mis-match Arkansas school names.

How much of a school is voucher-fundedpublished

At the average participating school, voucher students were 48% of enrolment in 2024-25. At some schools they are all of it.

2023-24 report Table 1 (97 schools); 2024-25 report Table 1 (126 schools). The mean of the 2024-25 column is 47.8%, matching the report's stated 48%. reconciles The 2023-24 equivalent does not reproduce: averaging that report's own 97 percentages gives 37.9% against its stated 39%. See reconciliation.

Growth, school by schoolpublished

The schools whose names match exactly across both years, ranked by the number of voucher students they gained. Little Rock Christian Academy went from 360 to 637; Shiloh Christian from 233 to 488.

Participant counts from Table 1 of each report. Only schools matching on an exact normalised name are shown — see the identifier problem below for why the others cannot be tracked.

Growth in dollarsderived

Per-school dollars do not exist for 2023-24, so growth in money received cannot be read off the reports. It can be computed: participants × that year's account value. Nothing here is a model — it is one published number multiplied by another.

Assumes every participant carries the standard award. Former Succeed Scholarship participants carry 100% of the prior year's foundation funding rather than 90%, so these are slight under-estimates at schools serving them. The cross-check below is what makes the arithmetic usable rather than merely plausible.

The cross-check that validates itderived

If the implied figures are sound, and if Appendix B really covers one semester as its footnote claims, then Appendix B should land at about half of implied full-year dollars. Each dot is one school. The dashed line is 50%.

The school-identifier problemabsent

Schools appear by name only. No code, no ID, no address. That sounds like a technicality until you try to follow one school across two years of its own programme.

Matching is exact on a normalised name (case, punctuation and spacing removed; the parenthesised city stripped, which is what makes campuses collapse). No fuzzy matching was attempted anywhere in this project: it is known to mis-match Arkansas school names, and an earlier trial produced a documented false match (“Saline County Christian School” to “Clover Community School”).

Assessment, school by schoolpublished

Average percentile on a nationally norm-referenced test, by school. Not the state test that public schools sit, so this cannot be compared with a public school's results — only with the national norm of 50.

2024-25 report Appendix C. 128 rows, of which 119 report a maths percentile; the rest are printed N/A. Circle size is the school's voucher enrolment.

Retention, school by schoolpublished

Arkansas publishes per-school retention, which most voucher states do not. And this table is the only school-level 2025-26 data in the entire published record — it measures the 2024-25 → 2025-26 transition, not the year the report otherwise covers.

2024-25 report Table 2, pages 17–21. The overview above the table states “Entering its third year (i.e., 2025-26), the EFA program retained 91% of participating students from the previous year (i.e., 2024-25)”. The table carries 127 rows against 126 participating schools because the last row is a Homeschool aggregate, not a school — 126 + 1 = 127, exactly, and the aggregate is excluded from the chart above. The 2023-24 report carries its own Table 2 for the previous transition (2023-24 into 2024-25): the two are consecutive and non-overlapping, and must never be differenced against each other.

The 90% rule, and the gap it leaves familiesderived

An account is worth 90% of what the state spent per public school student the year before. That holds to the cent in all four years. A payment-platform fee is then withheld before the money reaches the family — the dashed line.

Derived, and this is why: the foundation rates are published — DESE State Aid Notices and Act 909 of 2025 — but the allocated amounts drawn here are computed as 90% of the prior year's rate rather than transcribed, which is arithmetic on published figures, not reproduction of them. The cross-check the badge requires is the chart's own point: all four computed years match the amounts the state published, to the cent. That is what makes this chart demonstrate the statute instead of restating it. Two figures circulate for each year and both are correct: the allocated amount (90% of the prior year's foundation funding, per Ark. Code Ann. § 6-18-2505(a)(1)) and the net amount reaching the family after the payment-platform transaction fee the department withholds under § 6-18-2505(e)(2)(B), capped at 5%. 2025-26 is $6,994 allocated / $6,864 net; 2026-27 is $7,346 / $7,208. No net figure was published for 2023-24 or 2024-25, so none is drawn for those years. The withholding runs 1.85–1.88% across all three published pairs. reconciles

What a voucher actually coversobtained

The state collects tuition on every school's application form and publishes none of it. The Arkansas Advocate requested those applications under freedom-of-information law and got them. At the average participating school, tuition runs about $9,800 against a 2026-27 account worth $7,346 — so the account covers roughly three-quarters of a year, and the family covers the rest.

Arkansas Advocate, 1 July 2026 (Antoinette Grajeda), from 170 application packets released by the Department under a state Freedom of Information Act request: “Data was collected from Educational Freedom Account program applications provided by the Arkansas Department of Education through a state Freedom of Information Act request.” This is the request that sentence describes — it does not cover the 2026-27 approval counts elsewhere on this page, which are reported, not obtained. The tuition figure is stated by the source as “about $9,800” and is drawn as an approximate band for that reason. The award amounts it is compared against are the state's own. See the absence register: tuition is a “collected, not published” row, and this chart is that row seen from the other side.

Which schools wanted inobtained

The same records show how the state handled the schools themselves. 176 private schools applied to take part in 2026-27; 164 were approved and 2 were denied.

Same source and same request as above. No state publication carries these counts for 2026-27 — the coverage matrix marks the row obtained for that reason. As with student applications, nothing published explains either denial.

Home schooling, 1997 to nowpublished

The longest continuous series the state publishes on any of this. Home schooling grew steadily for twenty-five years, jumped with the pandemic, and then jumped again — this time with public money attached.

DESE annual home school reports, 1997-98 to 2025-26, as compiled in this project. Shaded band marks the EFA era. These are all home-schooled students, not only those with voucher accounts.

Seventeen different testspublished

Participating schools choose their own nationally norm-referenced test. Seventeen were used. The result reported as the programme's headline is an average across all of them.

2024-25 report Table 8. Completions sum to 12,218, matching the stated total. reconciles Names are shortened on the axis only; hover for the instrument exactly as printed.

The state test, at four schoolspublished

ATLAS is the assessment every Arkansas public school sits. Four participating private schools administered it to about 300 voucher students — the only directly comparable outcome data the programme has produced in three years.

2024-25 report Table 11 and Appendix D. About 300 students at 4 of 126 participating schools. Clear Spring School did not administer the science assessment. Six of the fourteen published rows sum to 99 or 101, because the source rounds each of the four levels independently — the bars are drawn exactly as printed and are deliberately not normalised to 100, which would invent precision the source does not have. Rows that do not sum to 100 say so.

What exists, by yearabsent

The single most disorienting thing about this record is that it is not the same record from year to year. Twenty-six measures against four years: filled where published, half-filled where partial, violet where obtained under FOIA rather than published, empty where absent.

A measure counts as published only if it appears at the stated granularity in a report or appropriation act for that year. 2025-26 and 2026-27 are thin because no annual report exists for either; everything shown for them comes from appropriation acts, the 2024-25 report's forward-looking Outlook, its retention table — which reaches into 2025-26 — and, for 2026-27, records released under FOIA.

The absence registerabsent

Probes performed against the two annual reports, the DESE programme pages, the Arkansas General Assembly's document server, and this project's own earlier audits. Every row carries the date it was last checked. “Obtained by” records a published instance of someone getting the data from the state anyway; it is evidence of releasability, not a claim about what should be released.

Completeness auditabsent

Every numbered table, figure and appendix in both reports, and whether this page uses it. This is how the claim “nothing has been missed” is made checkable rather than asserted.

Enumerated programmatically from the documents themselves, not from their contents pages. Objects marked “found in sweep” were missed by the first pass and located by a later completeness audit — including both sector spending tables and the 2023-24 report's own retention table, which turns out to cover the transition before the one the 2024-25 report measures.

Reconciliation

Every figure on this page that has a stated total in its source has been checked against it. The checks that fail are printed with the ones that pass.

The data

Arkansas publishes all of this as PDF tables and nothing else. A page that says so has an obligation to publish it properly, so every table behind every chart above is here, as CSV and as one workbook. They are generated by the same build that generates the page, so they cannot drift from what you see.

CC BY-NC 4.0. Read the methodology first — in particular the three warnings about Appendix B covering one semester, the two retention tables measuring different transitions, and the absence of any persistent school identifier.