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Sometime this month, Indiana will ask the Trump administration for unprecedented flexibility in how it funds and evaluates schools.
The state wants to receive its federal education funding in block grants, and in turn give the money to schools to spend with fewer strings attached.
The potential change is meant to reduce bureaucracy, state officials have said, and allow both the state and school districts to direct the funding to their top goals. It’s welcomed by the U.S. Department of Education, and in line with the Trump administration’s stated goal to give states more oversight of education.
But education advocates worry the state’s plan will take money away from student groups that often need a lot of support, like rural students and English learner students, as well as underperforming schools. Moreover, they say Indiana can already use flexibility in federal law to combine some funds and streamline accountability without seeking a waiver from accompanying regulations.
After concluding public comment on the plan at the end of August, Indiana intends to formally submit the request for a waiver from the Every Student Succeeds Act in September, according to a July presentation. The state will work with federal education officials on the “technical requirements” of the waiver through the fall and winter, the presentation said.
The state education department did not make Secretary of Education Katie Jenner available for an interview about the waiver request before Chalkbeat’s deadline.
What comes next? It’s not clear when — or if — the state might get full approval. The kind of spending flexibility that Indiana is seeking is in a grey area of what Secretary of Education Linda McMahon is allowed to grant, said Anne Hyslop, director of Policy Development at All4Ed, a nonprofit advocacy group.
“The flexibility is unprecedented. These waivers have not been requested before,” Hyslop said.
The federal department invited states to submit ESSA waiver requests in August, and two states — Iowa and Oklahoma — did so earlier this year. Iowa officials said the department is still helping the state with its request.
Ultimately, the Trump administration may have different responses to different parts of Indiana’s plan, Hyslop said.
Here are three more questions education advocates are asking about Indiana’s waiver plan.
Will funding reach the students who need it?
The bedrock of Indiana’s waiver request is more flexibility for the state and school districts to spend their federal Title funding, which pays for everything from teacher training to STEM and childcare programs.
To do this, the state is asking to consolidate many Title funds it receives into a single block grant. Additionally, while the state will not change how it allocates Title funds to districts, it seeks to remove the requirements that spell out what districts must use the money for, allowing them to use it on any activities approved by federal education law.
According to the state’s draft waiver request, this would help districts whose individual Title allocations have been too small to fund meaningful programs, like the 310 districts that received less than $25,000 to educate English learners, or the 230 districts that received less than that amount for students’ academic enrichment.
But advocates have expressed concerns that removing the guardrails of Title funding will mean less is spent on the needs of protected individual student groups, like English learner students. Education advocacy groups have suggested that the state instead use the existing flexibility allowed by the Every Student Succeeds Act to consolidate some funds.
“The state has not demonstrated why additional flexibility is needed beyond what already exists, particularly when that additional flexibility would primarily impact funding specifically designated for at-risk students, English learners, and rural students,” said joint comments from groups including All4Ed, EdTrust, and the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates.
Indiana in 2023 consolidated a state grant for English learner students into general tuition support. Teachers and administrators have since raised concerns about the money not being spent on English learner programming, according to a policy paper on the waiver request from the Indiana Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages. Using this money without oversight creates an environment in which “there are no consequences” for not serving those students, the paper said.
Consolidating Title III dollars for English learners runs similar risks, and would leave that group of students in Indiana without a dedicated source of funding, said one of the paper’s authors, Trish Morita-Mullaney.
Indiana Secretary of Education Katie Jenner said during the August State Board of Education meeting that the state will continue to serve student populations with additional needs. But she added that “for every single grant, there is a pile of compliance paperwork that has to be completed, even if across the board you’re just trying to get kids to read, or just trying to get kids access to STEM,” Jenner said.
If the state offers flexibility, it should also provide districts with information about high-quality, research-backed programs to ensure the money will effectively address student needs, said Thomas Toch, director of FutureEd, an education-focused think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.
Will Indiana’s unfinished A-F model be ready to act as the sole accountability measure?
Another ask in Indiana’s waiver request is to use the state’s own A-F school accountability model as the sole metric for school accountability.
The purpose, according to the state, is to create one set of expectations for schools, while better aligning those expectations with the state’s new diploma requirements and focus on career readiness.
But that A-F system doesn’t exist yet. It’s currently under development, with a final draft due to be voted on by the state Board of Education later this year.
“Asking to waive all federal accountability without showing what the new accountability system will look like feels premature,” said Hyslop of All4Ed.
Education groups say it’s also not clear why the state needs to waive federal standards in order to streamline accountability. Other states have put in place streamlined accountability models by aligning state standards to federal standards.
But Indiana’s current draft proposal does not include several accountability measures that are required federally, like a standalone high school graduation indicator and English proficiency rates for English learners, according to comments from EdTrust and other education groups.
The proposal also doesn’t include a plan to identify schools where groups of students are struggling academically, “a bedrock of federal education policy for over 20 years,” wrote All4Ed.
What will happen to students at underperforming schools?
The final component of Indiana’s waiver request would redirect School Improvement Grant funding away from the low-performing schools to other neighboring schools — like charters and microschools. Indiana says the current system has failed to improve underperforming schools, as measured by state test scores and graduation rates.
But education groups say this would make it more difficult to support students who stay at the identified schools and can’t transfer.
Indiana is not alone in declaring the SIG program a failure. A widely cited 2017 report found that schools across the country that received this funding did not improve — and some even declined.
But that report was based on a previous iteration of the SIG program, education analysts said, which required more prescriptive interventions and spread the available funding to more schools. Indiana began allocating the funding on a competitive basis in 2021, giving fewer schools more money and leeway to make improvements.
At the same time, the 2017 national survey missed some local improvements in students’ academic proficiency and graduation rates, Toch said. Schools may have made progress but still be in the bottom distribution of schools.
Still, it may be easier to start a new school to take in students than turn around an existing one, Toch said.
“We don’t want to give up on SIG schools. There is evidence you can make a difference, but to do so, you have to bring in new leadership, new teachers, a new culture,” Toch said.
But an All4Ed study found that four in 10 low performing schools in Indiana had less per-pupil spending after they were identified — making it unsurprising that some schools would remain on the lowest-performing list, the organization said in public comments on Indiana’s plan.
“We are alarmed that IDOE’s request appears to give up on the notion of trying to improve the state’s lowest performing schools,” the comment said.
Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. Contact her at aappleton@chalkbeat.org.
