Washington, D.C., June 16, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Education today approved Indiana’s request to overhaul how it tracks and funds the education of more than one million students, a move the National Parents Union warns will hide how schools are actually serving kids and strip protections from the state’s most vulnerable learners.
Marketed as “flexibility” and a return of education “closest to students,” the waiver does the complete opposite for families. Under Indiana’s new A-F system, school quality measures are layered in as multipliers of academic performance rather than reported straight, meaning that a strong attendance figure or a science score can quietly cancel out a low reading score. The result is a report card built so that parents can’t read it.
“Parents in places like Gary, Indiana, have been failed for generations by schools that were never built to serve them, and the one tool they had to fight back was clear achievement data that exposed the failures and forced the system to answer for it,” said Keri Rodrigues, President of the National Parents Union. “This waiver takes that tool away. Now a high school pass rate or a steady attendance number can paper over the fact that a school’s students still can’t read, and a parent fighting for their child will never see it coming. We cannot fight for what we are not allowed to see.”
For Indiana’s nearly 100,000 multilingual learners, the stakes are even higher. The approved waiver lets the state sweep federal Title III dollars, money meant specifically to help English Learners, into a single block grant, with no commitment to how those students will keep getting served. Under Indiana’s new accountability system, English language progress drops from a required, standalone indicator to an optional measure schools can set aside, which means the very declines this funding shift is likely to cause can be quietly erased from a school’s grade. The children with the most to lose become the easiest to overlook.
“Accountability data is the most important tool parents have to demand better when a school is failing their child. Indiana just got federal permission to weaken it, and the Trump Administration just signaled to every other state that these civil rights guardrails are negotiable,” continued Rodrigues.
About the National Parents Union
The National Parents Union is a network of parent organizations and grassroots activists working to improve the quality of life for children and families across the country. NPU represents more than 1.7 million families through over 1,800 affiliated organizations in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.