SB294 creates the Arkansas Children’s Educational Freedom Account program, providing annual state funding for qualifying educational expenses on behalf of “any resident” who is “eligible to enroll in a public elementary or secondary school.”
The Senate passed SB294 on March 3, 2023, by a vote of 26 to 8. We have assigned pluses to the nays because education is not the role of government—it is the responsibility of a child’s parents or family. This bill, under the appealing but misleading guise of “school choice,” only expands the government’s monopoly on K-12 education, which seeks to displace traditional private schools and homeschooling in favor of universal state-sponsored schooling. Its exchange of public subsidies for curriculum and other regulatory controls effectively turns every participating student into a government-school student. The best “school choice,” by far, is for parents to choose not to place their child’s education in the hands of the state. Educational and economic freedom cannot be achieved by forcing other citizens to furnish their hard-earned tax dollars to fund all that now entails a compulsory, failing, and government-run K-12 school system.
