Who Participates, What Do They Buy, and How Do They Score? Evidence from the Arkansas Education Freedom Accounts Program

In 2023, Arkansas enacted the Education Freedom Accounts (EFA) Program, which provides public funds to families to spend on their children’s private or home education. Many stakeholders have raised concerns about the program’s ability to serve disadvantaged students and its fiscal impact on taxpayers and public school districts. Using student-level data from the Arkansas Department of Education, we determine the student characteristics that predict initial participation in the EFA program. We also estimate the program’s fiscal effects in its first two years. Finally, we report the average scores of participants on nationally normed tests. We find that the program’s service prioritization system, established in statute and specified in administrative rules, operated as intended disproportionally to enroll students with various characteristics of disadvantage. We also find that savings from students exiting public schools did little to offset the program’s cost to the state, though overall expenditures were small relative to Arkansas’s total K–12 education spending. Fiscal impacts are more likely to be felt locally, though potential funding declines represent a small share of district budgets. We analyze transaction-level data to understand how families allocate EFA funds, offering insights into program implementation and its implications for broader school choice policy. Finally, we report the 2025 test scores of EFA students, which average above national norms.