Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders announces details of her education package on Feb. 8, 2023 at the State Capitol.
Stipulated: The primary function of public schools is to educate our children.
And in Arkansas, they don’t appear to be doing a very good job of that. Only 35% of the state’s third-graders were proficient in reading, according to the 2022 results of the ACT Aspire exams. The third-graders performed better in English (62% at the “ready” level) and math (52.4% “ready”).
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ education reform initiative, details of which she released last week, would seek to remedy that. The marquee elements of her plan are her proposal to raise the state’s minimum annual teacher salary from $36,000 to $50,000 and a voucher program that would give parents 90% of the funding schools receive per student to pay for their children to attend private or home schools. She calls this an “Education Freedom Account.”
The initiative also proposes forgiving teachers’ student loan debt if they commit to working in high-need areas in Arkansas, a $10,000 bonus to teachers who are “making meaningful gains in the improvement of student outcomes,” and a “dual diploma program” allowing high school students to focus on career readiness.
We have editorialized on behalf of raising teacher pay before. The average starting salary for Arkansas’ teachers puts it in the bottom five states in the nation.
But public schools are more than education factories. They are also the economic, cultural and social backbone of many Arkansas communities. And we fear that diverting funding from them to a voucher program could erode that backbone, particularly in the state’s many rural school districts where education choices are few.
As of press time, legislation to codify Sanders’ proposal hadn’t been filed. We look forward to learning how the governor and the Arkansas Legislature will work to ensure that public education remains robust.
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