At this week’s Legislative Joint Audit Committee on Educational Institutions, lawmakers came in hot. They spent the entirety of the meeting grilling the superintendent and school board president of Fouke School District over a few hundred dollars in travel reimbursements. They money was spent on a school sponsored college tour as wells as a handful of trips to visit a hospitalized student.
The tone was quite severe, as lawmakers talked about taxpayer dollars like they were being looted. They scolded the superintendent for “time away” from his district. And they repeated, over and over again, their legislative duty to hold public schools accountable for every cent.
Accountability is everything! they said.
But here’s the thing: the same legislators who are obsessed with “guardrails” for public schools are the ones in favor of Arkansas’s universal voucher program. Vouchers, or “Education Freedom Accounts” as Arkansas calls them, are a scheme that hands out millions in public dollars to private and homeschool families with no oversight, no transparency, and no academic standards. In fact, Arkansas just allocated $300 million to voucher expansion for the 2025-2026 academic year.
Where’s the legislative audit for that?
Lawmakers talk tough about taxpayers’ “blood, sweat, and tears” while public funds are funneled into elite academies and unregulated homeschools. Where’s the concern about “guardrails” when a wealthy family uses voucher money to offset tuition at a school that teaches religious extremism or refuses to accept students with disabilities? Where’s the concern about guardrails when taxpayers’ hard-earned cash pays for horseback riding lessons and new furniture?
The hypocrisy is stunning, but it should not be surprising. These lawmakers want to tear down public education under the guise of “choice” while scrutinizing public school educators for caring too much.
Superintendent Jim Buie of Fouke School District broke down during testimony, not because he was caught in wrongdoing, but because legislators grilled him for showing up for his students.
The school board for Fouke, their president testified, was aware of the reimbursements and wholeheartedly approved them. The community of Fouke backed Buie up, too. But lecturing legislators like Dan Sullivan wanted a different story; they didn’t care that taxpayers supported the expenditures.
If you’re just joining this conversation on vouchers vs. accountability, hers’s the context: supporters claim vouchers are about educational choice, but legislative audit’s showboating isn’t about fiscal responsibility. The whole thing is about power and ideology.
The universal voucher program is designed mostly for people who never believed in public schools to begin with. The program, however, is perfect for those who want to dismantle the system altogether. These “choice” policymakers see public education as a failed experiment rather than the backbone of opportunity in America.
Public schools have always had to operate under intense scrutiny. That’s not new or bad. In fact, it’s good, because public dollars should come with a hefty dose of accountability and oversight.
What’s is new — and dangerous — is the double standard. If lawmakers really cared about accountability, they’d start with auditing the millions of dollars in voucher funds that now flow to private institutions with zero public oversight. The shame is, they won’t.
Until we close the morality gap between how we treat public and private education, we will continue to fail Arkansas kids.
