On Feb. 22, 2023, the Arkansas Legislature’s Senate Education Committee gathered to first discuss SB 294, a 145-page bill filed just two days earlier that would eventually be passed into law as the Arkansas LEARNS Act.
During that committee meeting, then-state Sen. Greg Leding, a Democrat from Fayetteville, asked the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Breanne Davis, a Republican from Russellville, about accountability for private schools.
Greg Leding: Under this legislation, if it were law, could I walk across the street, hand in my letter of resignation, drive back to Fayetteville and open the Jim Dotson Institute for Liberal Ideology with no background in education?
Breanne Davis: You’re giving Sen. Dotson an idea. No, you can’t do that.
Leding: There’s gonna be a statue of you out front, too. It’s going to be great.
Davis: There. No. There is an accreditation process. Like, there is a process to go through. Schools can’t just pop up and say, hey, we’re taking kids, come on.
But a little over three years later, a group of journalists from ProPublica did exactly what Sen. Davis said they couldn’t. The idea launched as a joke in a newsroom brainstorming session, but they quickly moved into thinking about it seriously.
And once they decided they were going to try to do it, they met with their standards and legal team, laid down some ground rules and decided to see how easy it would be to launch schools in three different states, including Arkansas.
Jodi Cohen is an education reporter for ProPublica and one of the authors of the story “How ProPublica Reporters Became Private School Owners in 24 Hours.” She says they were transparent through the entire application process.
Jodi Cohen: This was not some undercover reporting exercise. Part of it was, could we do this? And there were some things we said we would not do. Like, that’s what we would do. We would be transparent. We would not do anything that would violate a state law or a state rule, which is different depending on the state. And we would not go through extra efforts that would strain public resources in any kind of way. We don’t want taxpayer dollars or public employees to be spending their time on our project.
Another element of the transparency was the name of the school itself.
Cohen: We’re trying to start the ProPublica-Arkansas Times Curiosity Academy. That’s what we called it in Arkansas. To start a private school, the Arkansas Department of Education actually doesn’t have any rules for opening a school. We really didn’t have to do anything. But we did go to the secretary of state’s office, the website, and registered our ProPublica-Arkansas Times Curiosity Academy so that there was some official recognition of the school.
Matthew Moore: Yeah. And your reporting here, it says all it took was filling out a form on the Arkansas secretary of state website, $45 and an American flag to be recognized as a private school business.
Cohen: That’s right. So Arkansas law does say that all schools, public and private, have to fly the American flag. So that’s why we went and bought a flag. So yes, we paid the secretary of state fee for registering a business, and we bought a flag.
Moore: When you look at the experience from the other states, West Virginia and North Carolina, compared to Arkansas, what was harder to do in Arkansas, and what was easier to do in your experience?
Cohen: So in Arkansas, after we did the registration as a business, we did think about and went through with applying for EFA through the EFA, the Education Freedom Account program, the program by which the public money is provided to private schools.
At first, we weren’t going to do that because there are some rules for private schools, like you have to be accredited or be seeking accreditation. That seemed like a step too far. You have to have been open for a year, which obviously we were not.
However, when we look more closely, if we wanted to apply as a microschool, you do not have those requirements. You have to give them basic information. You had to provide a document with your tuition. You had to provide a refund policy. So we did end up applying to the EFA program.
We said in the tuition information, we clearly said that this was for journalism. So we decided to go through that. We were never, ever going to accept any kind of taxpayer money or actually register in ClassWallet. But we did go through that. So that process was very easy.
How it compared to North Carolina and West Virginia? In West Virginia, similarly, with microschools, we at first were told we would need an inspection, and that was going to be an issue. But then we were told that if we wanted to be a microschool, we were not going to have to have that fire and other inspections. So we ended up going through the process and getting approved. And so that was fairly simple too.
North Carolina, we ran into an issue with the inspection because we actually partnered with a brewery, which The Assembly newsroom in North Carolina has events and has a partnership with this brewery there. And we decided to use the address of the brewery because they already had inspections. They had health inspection, fire inspection, so we thought we were covered there, when it doesn’t say what kind of inspection you have to have. We ended up getting told that we would need a school-specific inspection. And so that’s on hold at the moment.
Moore: What was your experience like communicating with the Arkansas Department of Education through this process?
Cohen: So when we applied for the EFA funding, we did not hear back for, I think it was about two weeks, and followed up and heard back from an employee there that we had missed the deadline to apply for this school year.
We applied on Sept. 1, and the employee said that the deadline for applications was Aug. 13, which was not stated on the website. So our application for EFA funding was not processed. We were told that we could apply next year for next school year, that the application would open in the spring, or we could apply as a vendor. Vendors are education providers, like for tutoring and other services like that.
Moore: At the end of this process, what was your takeaway? I mean, did you expect it to be as frictionless as it seems to have been?
Cohen: Both yes and no. I think you can see just how many more schools there are now in Arkansas, private schools. If you look at microschools, there were about 100 last school year, 2025-26. Now there are more than 140. I mean, to have 40 new microschools in one year. The number of private schools has grown dramatically as well.
So I’m not surprised that we could have a school, that the legislator could have a school, that most anyone could open a school, because the rules are not there. So I wasn’t surprised. I think going through it and seeing just really how simple it is, is still a little surprising when you see it firsthand.
Moore: You describe one of your influences, your inspirations, as John Oliver, who often does these sorts of stunts in his work. Do you worry that a stunt like this kind of pokes fun at the situation without reconciling the seriousness of how this could be manipulated?
Cohen: I hope not. I mean, I think hopefully it was written in such a way with the context that yes, this was kind of a fun John Oliver-esque endeavor, but with facts like the growth of the schools, facts about what you don’t have to do, what’s not required by the state.
This is not the only story we’ve published this year about Arkansas and other states. So within the context of the whole body of work, I hope people don’t think it’s just a joke, that they see the seriousness of what we’re writing about, too.
Moore: Yeah. You allude to the reporting you’ve done previously about private schools in Arkansas. And one story, which certainly got a lot of buzz here in the state, was about the private school where the teacher had students scrubbing the floor, had one student attack another student in the classroom. And the state is still funding that school.
When you look at these two specific instances in the framework of the LEARNS Act here in Arkansas, what do you think that says about the state of education here?
Cohen: Well, the act is still in its first few years. So with the upcoming session in January, I mean, you see it there. I mean, there’s discussion about should there be some more regulations? Should there not? I mean, it’s certainly led to a lot of discussion in the state. And maybe there’ll be tweaks to the legislation.
I know some people think there’s too much, some people think there’s not enough. There’s always that kind of friction. But it seems like people are learning, seeing how it’s played out, and there might be changes, or there might not be.
Jodi Cohen is a reporter at ProPublica covering education. We reached out to the Arkansas Department of Education for comment. They did not respond to our request in time for our reporting.
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