Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders says her state has produced a "major breakthrough" in public education, and she has the numbers to back up the claim. Student proficiency across all grades and subjects has risen more than 7 percentage points in three years under the LEARNS Act, the sweeping 2023 reform that raised teacher pay, boosted literacy programs, and banned critical race theory from classrooms.
Sanders announced the results the same day she sat down with Fox News Digital for an exclusive interview, framing the data as proof that conservative education policy works, and as a direct rebuke to progressive critics who have spent years attacking red-state school reforms.
The message from Little Rock is blunt: while teachers' unions and their allies in Washington fought these changes, Arkansas kids started reading better, scoring higher in math, and climbing out of the lowest performance tiers. Whether blue states are willing to learn from that is another question entirely.
The proficiency gains reported by the governor's office cover every core subject. In mathematics, 44.2% of Arkansas students met proficiency standards in 2026, up from 36.4% in 2024. Science proficiency jumped to 44.0% from 35.6%. English language arts rose to 39.5% from 33.8%.
Overall, 42.2% of students hit proficiency benchmarks in 2026, compared with 36.9% in 2025. That single-year leap of more than five points is the kind of movement that usually takes years to produce in a statewide system.
Perhaps the most telling figure sits at the bottom of the performance scale. Students performing at the lowest levels dropped from an average of 27.3% in 2025 to 23.1% in 2026, a decline across every subject. The kids who were struggling the most are the ones showing the fastest improvement.
Third-grade reading, widely considered the single most important predictor of long-term academic success, climbed from 36% in 2024 to 43% in 2026. And students in kindergarten through second grade, the first cohort to learn entirely under the LEARNS Act framework, exceeded 50% proficiency in nearly every subject and grade level.
Passed in 2023 with Republican backing, the LEARNS Act was not a single policy tweak. It was a top-to-bottom restructuring of how Arkansas funds, staffs, and governs its public schools.
The law raised the minimum teacher salary from $36,000 to $50,000, a jump large enough to change recruiting dynamics in a state that has long struggled to attract and retain classroom talent. It created performance-based bonuses, tying additional pay to measurable results rather than seniority alone. It directed new money toward literacy support and school safety initiatives.
And it drew a hard content line. The act banned classroom instruction related to critical race theory, gender identity, sexual orientation, and sexually explicit materials. That provision drew fierce opposition from teachers' unions and progressive advocacy groups, but Sanders and her allies argued that clearing ideological clutter from the curriculum would let schools refocus on the basics.
The early returns suggest the bet paid off. While Senate Democrats have repeatedly blocked conservative education and culture measures at the federal level, Arkansas moved ahead on its own terms, and the test scores followed.
The governor is not content to celebrate quietly. Sanders told Fox News Digital she wants the Arkansas model exported, and she named names, both allies and potential converts.
"I'm hopeful absolutely that red states will use what we're doing here as a blueprint, but I also hope that blue states will look at the success that you're seeing in places like Arkansas, Mississippi and others and try to follow suit because we want all kids to do well."
She went further, framing the results as a challenge that transcends partisanship.
"Seeing kids achieve and do better and be successful, that's not a red state or blue state issue. That's something everybody should care about."
It is a generous invitation, and one that progressive education leaders will almost certainly decline. Prominent teachers' union officials and former Vice President Kamala Harris have targeted red-state education policies in recent years, though the specifics of their objections have often been more about ideology than outcomes. When the numbers start moving in the right direction, the ideological arguments get harder to sustain.
The broader conservative policy landscape has been moving in a similar direction. The Interior Department recently cut partnerships with dozens of progressive organizations, reflecting a wider pattern of Republican-led institutions choosing results over institutional inertia.
Sanders resisted the temptation to credit any single provision of the law. Instead, she described the improvement as the product of a system-wide reset.
"Not any one thing, but it's the collective process of really transforming the way that we approach education. Realizing that every single kid can learn when given the right environment, when given the right tools, and letting failure not be an option."
Jacob Oliva, Secretary of the Arkansas Department of Education, reinforced that message in a press release issued by the governor's office.
"The LEARNS Act was a bold, innovative, and comprehensive approach to improve education. It was built on research, urgency, and the desperate need for change. These scores prove that listening to teachers, administrators, and parents wasn't just valuable but also essential. The plan is working. Arkansas students are reading, learning, and benefitting."
That last line, "listening to teachers, administrators, and parents", is worth pausing on. The standard union critique of Republican education reforms is that they ignore educators. Oliva's framing turns that argument on its head: the state listened, but it listened to the people inside the schools, not to the union headquarters in Washington.
The proficiency data comes from a new statewide exam, though the specific assessment instrument has not been publicly named in the governor's announcement. That matters. New tests sometimes produce score shifts that reflect changes in measurement rather than changes in learning. Independent verification of the results, from a body outside the governor's office, would strengthen the case considerably.
The total number of Arkansas public school students represented in the data has also not been disclosed. And while the year-over-year trends are consistent and move in the same direction across subjects, the baseline years for science and English language arts proficiency figures are not explicitly labeled in the state's own reporting.
None of that erases the trend. A 7-point gain across all grades and subjects over three years is not a rounding error. But the absence of independent corroboration is worth noting, if only because the strongest argument for conservative education reform is one that can survive hostile scrutiny.
Republican legislative efforts elsewhere have faced their own battles over accountability and transparency. Senate Republicans recently pushed through a budget resolution in an overnight marathon, demonstrating that the party is willing to grind through procedural resistance to deliver on policy promises. Arkansas's education results suggest that willingness can produce measurable outcomes beyond the budget line.
One element of the LEARNS Act that deserves more attention than it typically receives is the salary floor. Moving minimum teacher pay from $36,000 to $50,000 is not a marginal adjustment. It is a 39% increase that changes who applies for teaching jobs in Arkansas and who stays in them.
Performance-based bonuses add another layer. Teachers who produce results get rewarded for it. That is how compensation works in virtually every other profession, and the fact that it remains controversial in education says more about union politics than about sound management.
Sanders connected the dots between investment and results in her interview.
"We know that raising the bar, providing those resources and support for our students, for our teachers, for our superintendents makes a difference. We've got a recipe here that's working and absolutely hope it not only changes the conversation but frankly changes the system, changes the culture and education."
The word "culture" is doing real work in that sentence. The LEARNS Act was never just about money. It was about signaling that Arkansas expects its schools to teach reading, math, and science, not ideology. The pay raises gave that expectation teeth.
Meanwhile, at the federal level, House Republicans have shown a similar willingness to pair funding with accountability, rejecting carve-outs that would have diluted oversight in other policy areas.
The political dynamics here are straightforward. For years, progressive critics have argued that Republican-led states underfund education, mistreat teachers, and harm students, especially minority students, with restrictive curriculum laws. Arkansas just posted rising scores across the board while paying teachers more, banning ideological content, and tying bonuses to performance.
That combination is difficult to attack without sounding like you care more about the curriculum battles than about the kids. Sanders seems to understand that, which is why she keeps framing the results in nonpartisan terms even as the policy itself is unmistakably conservative.
The question now is whether any blue state will take her up on the offer. The political incentives cut against it. Adopting an Arkansas-style reform would mean confronting teachers' unions, abandoning DEI-adjacent curriculum mandates, and admitting that a Republican governor in one of the country's poorest states figured out something that wealthier, progressive-run school systems have not.
Even Democrats willing to break with their party's progressive wing have found that crossing institutional orthodoxy comes at a steep political cost. Education reform may prove to be the hardest line of all to cross, because the unions sit at the center of Democratic campaign infrastructure.
Sanders put it simply in her interview: "The thing we're most excited about is the fact that so many Arkansas students are doing better now than they would have been doing pre-LEARNS legislation."
That sentence contains no ideological flourish. It is a plain claim about measurable improvement in the lives of children. The data released by her office supports it. Independent validation would make the case airtight, and Arkansas should welcome that scrutiny.
But even in its current form, the Arkansas experiment poses a question that the education establishment would rather not answer: What if paying teachers well, demanding results, and keeping ideology out of the classroom is all it takes?
Sometimes the simplest recipe is the one nobody in charge wants to try, because admitting it works means admitting what they've been doing doesn't.