Editor’s Note…this piece was written by Hope native Richard Ware and is printed here with permission.

Arkansas Black Vitality – January 13, 2026

By Richard Ware

This article was originally published in Arkansas Black Vitality. You can view it here.

Nearly three years have passed since Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the Arkansas General Assembly enacted the LEARNS Act (Leading Education Advancement Reform Now Strategy), a sweeping education reform bill and an early signature legislative achievement for the state’s first female governor. As Arkansas enters the new year, Arkansan families and the state workforce are beginning to experience the law’s impact, shifting the focus from passage to real-world performance.

One of the most debated provisions of the LEARNS Act is the third-grade reading requirement, which holds students back if they cannot read at grade level—a policy that raises essential ethical questions about fairness, accountability, and the philosophy of American education. In this article, I explore these questions with curiosity, examining what the law intends, what it accomplishes, and who bears the burden of its consequences.

LEARNS Act Breakdown

Gov. Sanders and the Arkansas General Assembly enacted the LEARNS Act on March 8, 2023, aiming to strengthen the state’s education system, expand school choice, and improve Arkansas’s standing in national education rankings.

The law’s main provisions included increasing the starting teacher salary to $50,000, creating Educational Freedom Accounts for private and home schooling, expanding maternity leave, and launching programs to boost literacy and student readiness. Low-performing districts were required to partner with charter schools, and select teachers could earn bonuses for achievement and retention.

The legislation also repealed the Teacher Fair Dismissal Act, giving school districts more flexibility in hiring, firing, and managing staff. It further included measures aimed at preventing what lawmakers described as “indoctrination” in public schools, specifically banning the teaching of critical race theory—a policy mirrored in other conservative-led states.

There have been measurable signs of progress. According to U.S. News & World Report, Arkansas’s national education ranking rose from 45th in 2023 to 36th in 2025 following the law’s passage, a notable improvement that highlights both the promise and scale of the reform.

However, beneath the 145-page omnibus bill lay equally consequential changes to Arkansas education, from new literacy assessments to expanded reporting requirements for low-performing schools. While these measures have quietly reshaped classroom and district operations, the provision that will be the focus here is the following:

By the beginning of the 2025–2026 school year, if a public school student has not met the third-grade reading standard, as defined by the state board, or the student does not have a good-cause exemption as provided under this subsection, the student shall not be promoted to fourth grade.

(Regular Session, 2023; SB294, Page 51)

Third-Grade Reading Requirement

The policy is intended to ensure that students acquire essential literacy skills before advancing, reflecting widely supported research that reading proficiency by third grade is critical for long-term academic success. Yet the law’s blunt approach raises immediate questions: how should accountability be balanced between students and educators? And, perhaps more provocatively, if a student is held back due to low reading scores, should teachers’ pay or bonuses also be tied to their students’ performance?

If advancement is contingent on measurable performance, then the education system is implicitly asserting that outcomes matter more than intent, effort, or circumstance. That logic is not, in itself, unreasonable, but it invites scrutiny when applied unevenly. Students face clear consequences for falling short of the standard, yet teachers, whose professional role is to guide those outcomes, operate under a largely separate accountability structure.

The repeal of the Teacher Fair Dismissal Act can be read as aligning with this broader emphasis on measurable outcomes. By giving school districts broader discretion in hiring, firing, and managing educators, the LEARNS Act signals a shift toward outcome-oriented accountability. If students are evaluated, retained, or promoted based on measurable outcomes, the framework increasingly implies that educators are likewise connected to those results through job security and performance-based incentives.

Ethical and Equity Implications

Public education is not just a transaction between a teacher and a student—it is a shared responsibility involving families, schools, and the state. No single person fully controls a child’s academic outcome. When test scores and benchmarks become the primary measure of success, however, there is a risk that performance is mistaken for personal worth. In that framework, the challenges students and teachers face—many shaped by economic or social conditions—can quietly be reframed as individual or professional failures. This raises an important question: does the system distribute responsibility as fairly as it distributes consequences?

Teachers, for their part, occupy a complicated position. They are expected to deliver measurable results while navigating classroom sizes, curriculum mandates, assessment pressures, and the realities of student life beyond school walls. Linking pay or job security to student performance may align with outcome-based governance, but it also risks narrowing educational priorities and discouraging work in the very classrooms where challenges are greatest.

For students, the stakes are immediate and personal. Retention can provide additional time and support, but it can also carry social and psychological costs that ripple through a child’s academic identity. Whether those costs are justified depends not only on the policy’s intent, but on the quality and consistency of the supports that accompany it.

From an equity standpoint, uniform standards do not always yield uniform justice. Holding every third grader to the same benchmark presumes comparable starting lines, yet Arkansas’s rural–urban divide and persistent income disparities complicate that premise. If retention disproportionately affects students from already disadvantaged backgrounds, the policy risks reinforcing the very gaps it seeks to close unless counterbalanced by substantial, well-funded remediation and early intervention.

These equity concerns also apply to teachers. Accountability systems often rely on a simple principle: reward success and address failure. However, in public education, success is rarely the achievement of a single individual. Teachers inherit classrooms influenced by factors that existed long before the school year starts—such as class size, resources, family stability, and community conditions.

The question, then, is not simply whether accountability is necessary—it clearly is—but whether Arkansas’s approach strikes the right balance between standards and support, accountability and equity, and what we ultimately believe public education is meant to serve. The results show measurable improvement for the state, but improvement alone does not resolve the deeper social tension the policy exposes.

Richard Ware is a Hope, Arkansas native and senior at the University of Central Arkansas, where he is a double major in Political Science and Philosophy. His writing spans fiction and nonfiction, with a focus on education policy, civic responsibility, and community empowerment across Arkansas.