FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: media@edtrust.org

June 16, 2026

Approval of Indiana Waiver Abandons Federal K-12 Education Law
Statement from EdTrust President and CEO Denise Forte

WASHINGTON —“In approving Indiana’s waiver request, the U.S. Department of Education has abandoned the promise that every K-12 student should be supported to achieve at the same rigorous standards, that disaggregated data on how well schools are fulfilling that promise should be reported publicly, and that schools should receive support to deliver the promise of universal academic excellence.

“Instead, the Department of Education will allow Indiana to rewrite its accountability system in a way that will mask student performance and move millions of dollars in dedicated funding away from students who need it most. The Department is also breaking its own vow to America’s families not to ‘approve waivers that weaken transparency, blur performance data, or make it harder for parents to see how schools are truly serving students.’ In fact, the Department is letting Indiana do all three.

“Indiana claims its new accountability system will be student-centered and easier to understand. In reality, it is a convoluted scoring system that appears to be designed to limit transparency and accountability and undermines its positive new assessment system, which provides more actionable data for teachers throughout the year. Most concerning, Indiana’s plan appears to vary standards across student groups in a way that will allow the state to say, ‘Everyone is doing just fine.’

“Simply put, the changes to Indiana’s accountability and school improvement system are egregious:

• Schools are incentivized to inflate student grades and performance. By waiving the requirement that academic indicators have much greater weight than other school quality measures, high schools’ accountability scores will now be based as much on students passing classes — measures fully within a school’s control — as on scores on statewide assessments. The bulk of a high school’s score, 80%, is based only on students who graduate, giving a school little incentive to support students at risk of not graduating.
• Reading and math are de-emphasized. Schools that need additional resources to meet all students’ needs in math and reading may not be identified, because Indiana will produce school grades that can mask low math and reading scores. For students not on grade level, strong attendance, performance on basic screening tests, and scores in science and social studies can effectively erase the impact of low math and reading achievement. And Indiana’s ‘student-centered’ system will make this impossible to track, because the ‘eraser’ can be different for every student. While these other measures are important, they should not be used in place of ensuring students’ basic reading and math skills. That this aspect of the new accountability system was allowed to be implemented without the need for a waiver further raises alarm about how the Department of Education is abandoning essential equity guardrails in federal law.
• Multilingual learners are pushed aside. Through the consolidation of state funding across multiple federal programs, schools and districts supporting English learners could lose access to the supports they need to better help multilingual learners master English and learn alongside their peers. At the same time, Indiana’s new accountability model enables schools to ‘erase’ English learners’ lack of language progress, making it even harder for these students to get the supports they need.

“Indiana’s waiver claims it is designed to support ‘strategic priorities.’ However, the waiver clearly shows that helping every high school student graduate, ensuring every student has excellent reading and math skills, and supporting Indiana’s nearly 100,000 English learners are not priorities for state leaders.

“We have already seen several states follow the lead of Iowa, which received a much more limited waiver. Indiana’s waiver presents a much clearer danger, both to more than a million Hoosier students and the millions of students from other states, whose leaders now know the Department of Education is ready to abandon accountability and civil rights laws in the name of ‘returning education to the states.’”

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About EdTrust

EdTrust is committed to advancing policies and practices to dismantle the racial and economic barriers embedded in the American education system. Through our research and advocacy, EdTrust improves equity in education from preschool through college, engages diverse communities dedicated to education equity and justice, and increases political and public will to build an education system where students will thrive.