Arkansas moved Wednesday to pull its public schools out from under two layers of government oversight, submitting a “unified education plan to the U.S. Department of Education that would replace overlapping state and federal requirements with a single Arkansas-led system for funding, accountability, and assessment.”
The state Department of Education’s “Reclaiming Arkansas Education” plan would give school districts more freedom to direct federal dollars toward students rather than compliance paperwork, eliminate duplicative standardized testing, and establish a single school performance rating system rather than parallel state and federal report cards.
Iowa became the first state to win federal approval of a similar “Returning Education to the States” waiver, followed by Louisiana. The Trump administration has framed such plans as part of a broader effort to shrink the federal role in K-12 education…