As Arkansas enters its first year of universal access for the state’s Education Freedom Accounts program, it appears to be largely on track with the experiences of states that laid the foundation with similar initiatives in prior years.
School choice programs have soared in popularity in recent years as more states roll out programs that expand state taxpayer funding of student tuition and other educational expenses. Among the states that expanded school choice programs to become universal so far this year are Texas, Indiana and New Hampshire.
The expansion of school choice programs across the nation continues, even as Congress approved its own federal initiative. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed July 4, contained the country’s first federal school voucher program. Taking effect in 2027, the plan would allow taxpayers who donate to state voucher programs to receive back all of their money upon filing their federal taxes.
Arizona and Florida, two states with massive universal school choice programs, have offered funding for student tuition and other expenses to all students for several years. Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program launched 14 years ago, and the state expanded it to universal access in 2022. Florida’s Family Empowerment Scholarship was first created in 2014 and became open to all Florida students in 2023. These programs each enrolled tens of thousands of students in the 2024-25 school year and appear poised to do the same in the current year.
These programs, along with Arkansas’ Education Freedom Accounts program and related efforts in other states, are often colloquially referred to as vouchers — though some school choice advocates reject the term as inaccurate.
The school choice programs in Arkansas, Arizona and Florida are difficult to compare precisely against one another, owing to differences between their implementations, how program data is tracked and how much of that information is readily available to the public. Regardless, current information paints a picture of what Arkansans can expect from the Education Freedom Accounts program in future years.
Critics of Arkansas’ Education Freedom Accounts have projected the program will soar in cost as the 2025-26 school year begins, when it is first available to all Arkansas students. Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders has said she is committed to funding every student who applies and is eligible for program.
A total of 46,503 Education Freedom Account applications have been approved, while a total of 51,229 applications have been submitted, Education Department spokeswoman Rachel Starks said in an email.
Asked if the state expected to approve more applications this school year, Starks said, “We are finalizing the review of those that came in over the last few days before the portal closed. We will not have a final count of how many of the approved/eligible participants will be verified until early September.”
In June, the Arkansas Legislative Council approved a request by the Education Department for the full $90 million in a set-aside of the Restricted Reserve Fund for the program, an amount in addition to the $187.4 million in general revenue appropriation for the accounts in fiscal 2026 that lawmakers approved in mid-April, bringing the current total funding for the program during the fiscal year that began July 1 to $277.4 million.
If each of the approved students receives the full amount of their Education Freedom Account funding for the full 2025-26 year, though, the total cost of the program would easily surpass that amount. Senate President Pro Tempore Bart Hester, R-Cave Springs, has said he believes early departures from the program by students are likely to render further funding boosts unnecessary, though public school advocates have expressed skepticism about that. So far, the program has seen no official withdrawals this school year, according to Starks.
Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program is estimated to be funded at more than $880 million this year after the state’s Legislature approved its budget in late June, the Arizona Luminaria reported. The amount equals roughly 5% of the state’s total budget. Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs denounced the high costs of the program in her state of the state address in January, denouncing it as a “billion-dollar boondoggle.”
The Arizona Department of Education describes its program accounts as being “administered by the Arizona Department of Education (ADE) and funded by state tax dollars to provide education options for qualified Arizona students.” Similar to Arkansas, account funding for a qualified student is 90% of the state funding that would have otherwise been allocated to a public school district or charter school. A December 2024 issue brief by the Arizona State Senate put the average per-student award at $9,895.
Enrollment in Arizona’s program for the 2025-26 school year was 90,080 as of Monday, according to the state’s Department of Education.
Florida awarded roughly $2.8 billion in Family Empowerment Scholarships, up from $1.4 billion the previous year, Republican Florida state Sen. Don Getz told a panel, according to an article published in March by WFSU. However, an Aug. 27 report by the Florida Policy Institute states the fiscal 2025-26 budget includes more than $3.8 billion in funds for Family Empowerment Scholarships.
Florida’s Department of Education website states the program “expanded school choice options for all students in Florida. Florida’s choice options empower every family and every child to achieve their educational goals.” The scholarship is divided into two branches.
The first branch, Educational Options, “provides additional educational options for all K-12 students, such as attending a participating private school.” Families apply and annually renew for this branch through one of several approved scholarship funding organizations, which determine and distribute funding, according to the state’s Education Department.
The second branch, Family Empowerment Scholarship for Students with Unique Abilities, offers educational options for families of students with disabilities who are as young as 3.
“Families may choose to enroll their student in another public school, or they may choose to take the opportunity to receive a personal education savings account (ESA) for their student,” the agency’s website states. “With an ESA, instead of having their child attend a public school, parents receive a deposit of public funds into government-authorized savings accounts with restricted, but multiple, uses. An ESA can be used to fund not only items such as private school tuition and fees, but also online learning programs, private tutoring, community college costs, higher education expenses and other approved customized learning services and materials.”
EdChoice, an Indiana-based group that advocates for school choice, lists the average value of a Family Empowerment Scholarship for Educational Options as 72% of public school per-student spending, while the branch for Unique Abilities is listed at 90%.
For the 2024-25 school year, the amount Florida got came out to an average of about $8,100 per student in the Educational Options program and about $10,000 in the Unique Abilities program.
During the 2024-25 school year, enrollment in the Family Empowerment Scholarship for Educational Options program was 220,974, while 107,006 participated in the Unique Abilities program, according to EdChoice.
Neither the school choice initiatives in Arizona or Florida have caps that limit program enrollment or funding, and the programs in both states also provide funds that families can use if they homeschool their children.
While some critics in Arkansas have been skeptical of the claim that enough students will drop out of the program that a funding boost will not be needed, reports from Arizona and Florida suggest that not everyone who is eligible or approved for such a program will use them. However, those reports suggest barriers exist in those areas that make it more difficult for certain populations to take advantage of such funds.
An Oct. 12, 2024, report by ProPublica states that lower-income families in Arizona use its Empowerment Scholarship Account program less frequently than those with higher incomes. The locations of private schools, as well as additional costs for such needs as transportation and meals, are among the obstacles that make it more difficult for lower-income families to use the funds, according to ProPublica’s analysis.
A July 2025 report by Step up for Students, the organization that administers education choice scholarships on behalf of Florida families, states, “This year, 41,000 Florida students were awarded school choice scholarships but never used them.” A survey distributed by the group found that roughly a third of respondents wanted to use their scholarships but there were no available seats at the school they wanted their child to attend. The finding comes even as the number of private schools in Florida has grown by 31% over the past decade, suggesting that even as the number of private schools in the state rapidly increases, demand still outpaces supply.
Another reason that some participants did not use their funds may be the rising costs of private school tuition in their states. A Dec. 14, 2023 article by the Hechinger Report, an outlet that describes itself as covering “innovation and inequality in education,” suggested that some private institutions raised their tuitions by thousands of dollars. A Jan. 22, 2024 report by the conservative think tank the Goldwater Institute argues “the state’s private school providers have kept tuition rates far lower than the cost of public school per pupil.
“Additionally, ESAs now cover nearly 100% of tuition at the majority of private schools throughout the state,” the institute’s report said.
Tuition at a number of private institutions in Arkansas increased for the 2025-26 school year, as they did for the previous year.
Several additional reports have suggested that prices at private schools tend to rise in states with universal school choice programs. An April 2024 report published by researchers at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University states that causal evidence suggests Iowa’s Education Savings Account program led private schools in that state to increase tuition. A 2016 article published in the Journal of Economics found “robust evidence that school subsidies raise revenue for the private schools in our sample and that the magnitude of this effect is large.”
The number of universal school choice programs in the nation is steadily increasing. At least 19 states — largely Republican-led — either have one or more universal school choice program or are on track to have one, according to Education Week.
Similar efforts are also happening at the federal level. U.S. Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon said during an Aug. 12 visit to Arkansas that President Donald Trump believes that students “should have the opportunity (to attend) where they can be the most successful.” Universal school choice options, McMahon said, are “one way to help drive that.”
With support from the ADG Community Journalism Project, LEARNS reporter Josh Snyder covers the impact of the law on the K-12 education system across the state, and its effect on teachers, students, parents and communities. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette maintains full editorial control over this article and all other coverage.
