On July 7, 2026, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon approved Arkansas' "Returning Education to the States" waiver during a visit to Hot Springs Junior Academy, joined by Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Arkansas Education Secretary Jacob Oliva. The approval package also included an Ed-Flex waiver and amendments to the state's ESEA accountability plan, giving Arkansas consolidated authority over several federal funding streams and new leeway in how districts spend those dollars.
What the waiver does
The waiver merges four federal funding streams into a single block grant totaling over $8.8 million across four years, according to McMahon. The Arkansas Department of Education proposed administering Title II Part A and Title IV Part A through a block-grant approach and consolidating all ESEA state-level activity funds, including state set-asides, to streamline administration.
The package also expands Alternative Fund Use Authority, known as AFUA, to additional rural districts. Under the existing ESEA framework, AFUA was limited to districts eligible under the Small, Rural School Achievement program. Arkansas proposed waiving that limitation, using Rural and Low-Income School eligibility instead to determine pilot participants, which would allow more districts to redirect Title II-A and Title IV-A funds toward any allowable Title I-A purpose without completing a separate transfer.
The accountability amendments address two student populations. Students who complete high school coursework before entering high school would face simplified accountability requirements, and students educated in alternative learning environments would be counted with their home school for accountability purposes rather than their placement site.
Civil rights and spending protections
State officials, in an April presentation to the state Board of Education, emphasized that Arkansas is not seeking reduced civil rights protections for English-language learners, reduced spending requirements for high-need students, or reduced support for struggling schools. The ADE's May 27 letter to Secretary McMahon framed all three waiver components as tools to reduce administrative burden as part of the state's strategic plan.
The Ed-Flex waiver component allows the Arkansas Department of Education to waive certain ESEA statutory requirements on behalf of districts, using an internal application process to issue statewide and individual LEA waivers intended to cut district-level compliance burden.
A multi-state pattern
Arkansas is the fifth state to receive the "Returning Education to the States" waiver. Iowa was first in January 2026, consolidating four programs into a single $9.5 million block grant, though Iowa initially requested more funding than it received. Louisiana followed in February 2026. Indiana and Vermont both received waivers in June 2026.
The broader push began in July 2025, when the U.S. Department of Education sent a letter to every state education department urging them to seek waivers from statutory and regulatory provisions the department characterized as burdensome. Arkansas submitted its three waiver applications on May 27, 2026, following a 30-day public comment period.
Building on existing flexibility
Arkansas' waiver does not create flexibility from scratch. The ESEA already gives states transferability authority and AFUA, and the state's waiver request notes that ADE currently uses both. The new waiver builds on those structures rather than replacing them, expanding which districts can participate and consolidating how the state administers the funds at the state level.
What remains unaddressed in the available record is evidence on whether block-granting federal education funds and expanding AFUA actually improve student outcomes. The brief's research base does not include peer-reviewed studies or evaluations of the "Returning Education to the States" waiver model, which is too new to have generated published findings. Iowa received the first approval only six months before Arkansas, and no outcome data from any of the five approved states has yet been documented in the available sources.
Update - September 4, 2026
Since Arkansas' approval, the roster of states receiving "Returning Education to the States" waivers has grown. South Dakota became the sixth state to receive the waiver, bringing the total consolidated funding across all approved states to more than $109 million, according to Kirsten Baesler, assistant secretary for the U.S. Education Department's Office of Elementary and Secondary Education [10].
The number of states granted Ed-Flex authority has also increased to 22, the highest in the program's 32-year history, up from 21 when Arkansas was approved in July [10]. The Education Department has also begun offering additional competitive-grant points to states that design or lead "Returning Education to the States" projects, and plans to convene state representatives in September 2026 to discuss results from a Learning Agenda Initiative involving Arkansas and seven other states [10].