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PODCAST | “Freedom to Learn”: What Does Returning Education to the States Mean?

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Haley Sanon, Acting Assistant Secretary for OESE, joins Freedom to Learn to talk about the U.S. Department of Education’s first steps to shift power out of Washington.

Make sure to follow Freedom to Learn on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are released every Thursday.

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You have a big responsibility at the Department of Education. You oversee what is called OESE. And we’d like to not speak too much in acronyms here. So I’d love for you to tell us what that means.

Haley Sanon: So my office is the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, where I am another long one for you, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, or PDAS for short. And I’m currently the Acting Assistant Secretary until we have our Senate-confirmed leadership come through. And that office is responsible for basically all things K-12 education, except for special education, which is handled in a different part of the Department of ED.

You have been issuing what are called Dear Colleague Letters or DCLs. And these were designed, I guess, to encourage states and districts to expand education freedom options, to explore flexibilities that already exist in the federal education law. Can you tell us a little bit about what a Dear Colleague Letter does? And then we’ll talk a little bit about the goals or the purpose behind the letters.

Hayley Sanon: A Dear Colleague Letter is non-binding, non-regulatory guidance, which in plain speak means it is there to remind you of statutory obligations, or in this case, to remind you of flexibilities in the law and say, ‘hey, the law says this. So you might want to consider X, Y, and Z when you’re implementing.’ No state is required to follow Dear Colleague Letters. I like to point that out. They are not meant to put a thumb on the scale. Really. It’s about emphasizing pieces of existing statutes, opportunities for improvement, and kind of highlighting where there might be more enforcement action given the administration’s priorities. I like to call them our little love notes to the field. And so that’s what these are.

These were really building off of work that was done under the first Trump administration to highlight flexibilities in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. So ESEA, as we call it, governs K-12 federal education policy. It was last reauthorized in 2015. That was what was referred to as the Every Student Succeeds Act. Some people might know its previous reauthorization better, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. So these are different iterations of the same law. The 2015 iteration really added a lot of statutory flexibilities into the law. So said, ‘hey, this is our preferred pathway;’ but in this focus on giving more power to the states and taking away some of the federal overreach that we saw under No Child Left Behind, it introduced opportunities for states to do things differently.

The first Trump administration put together a guidance document in fall of 2018. It was very, very long that highlighted every single one of these flexibilities. And right as states started to grapple with it and implement, the COVID-19 pandemic happened, and so these really fell by the wayside.

And so now that we’re post-pandemic and really thinking about returning education to the states, how can we re-up these flexibilities to encourage more states to use them and leverage them in innovative ways? So that’s where the Dear Colleague Letter series came from. Our first one, to your point, was on education choice, and it was four letters highlighting four that really get at expanding options for students. And now we’ve just begun a new series around flexibility, other flexibilities in ESEA that will be “returning education to the states” focused.

So, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, you mentioned two updates: No Child Left Behind and ESSA. This law has been around since what, 1965? A very long time, in fact, 15 years before the US Department of Education was created. So this is the governing law when it comes to federal education programs. And as you mentioned, ESSA, the most recent iteration of it, has these flexibilities that people might not know. I’ve heard you say before that some folks out in the field are still thinking that they’re governed under the No Child Left Behind version of the law.

Haley Sanon: When we gave flexibility back through the Every Student Succeeds Act, this one step forward towards returning education to the states that now we’re continuing to build off of and want to go a lot further on, really a lot of states said, ‘but I know I won’t get in trouble doing it in the No Child Left Behind way.’ They didn’t really believe that they had the power that they were given because they were so used to No Child Left Behind. I’ve heard folks on Capitol Hill describe it as we took the No Child Left Behind handcuffs [off], and states have just stood there and said, ‘but, this is what I’m used to.’

And I think that speaks to the level of compliance cost and burden that a lot of our federal programs have, that a lot of states are using their funds in the same way they always have despite increased flexibility, despite broad allowable uses of how you’re able to use these funds, purely because they don’t want to risk getting in trouble or running afoul of some provision with the federal government, even if it’s in the best interest of students to go a different path.

They just haven’t really explored opportunities to improve how they’re spending these funds.

What’s the message that you most want states and district leaders to take from these Dear Colleagues?

Hayley Sanon: I really want to emphasize to them that this is a Department of Education that wants to get to yes on giving them as much power and flexibility as possible. We’re not going to give them the legal run around. We’re not going to coat things and bureaucraties and legalese, right? We want this to be a direct like this is what the law says. You clearly have the authority to do much more than what you’re doing right now, and we want to help you explore that and really to shake that old mindset and say we need to be focused on what’s best for students. So many of our state superintendents are just incredible and really squarely focused on this. And I don’t think the federal government, the Department of Ed, previously has had their back in this way. And so saying, take us up on it, work with us, and let’s get you these flexibilities so that you can do things the way that best serves your students.

So a Dear Colleague is sent to the state education chief, to the state superintendent or state commissioner. What about district superintendents? How do they play into this?

Hayley Sanon: The federal Department of Education and districts have kind of a unique relationship because we mostly don’t give them money. We give money to states, who then administer the funds down to the districts. So we don’t usually have a role in districts because we would be inappropriately leapfrogging the state, right? So the state is the recipient of the federal funds, and then they administer the grant program further down to the district level, and they are charged with doing the oversight, the monitoring, etc. of districts that are within their state.

However, our second Dear Colleague Letter in the flexibility series is focused on Ed Flex; this has been around since the 1990s. It was reauthorized by ESSA in 2015. And it gives states very similar waiver authority to what the federal government has. So the Department of Education has waiver authority that we can grant waivers from any statutory or regulatory provision with limits. There is a very clear list of prohibitions on that waiver authority. If states follow a certain process and certain requirements of what they have to send to us and really focused on how does this benefit academic achievement, right? They have to make this case that this will benefit academic achievement to waive these provisions and this is how we will track and measure that.

So that’s what the federal government can do for states and for districts. So typically, states follow that process to get a waiver from us. And if a district wants a waiver, they have to request it from the state. The state then has to put together kind of this application of sorts, send that request to the federal government. We have to work through it. It’s quite the rigmarole. By becoming an EdFlex state, which is a pretty easy application, which 11 states are already currently an EdFlex state, that takes us out of it so that districts can directly request a waiver from their state, and the state can approve it without coming to us. So, same thing, there’s a process, there are certain requirements for it, there are prohibitions on what the state is able to waive, but that takes us out of it so that districts can request waivers directly from their state and have that same opportunity to really emphasize local control and do what’s best for their kids.

I’m glad that you mentioned that there are already 11 states who have this Ed Flex status. I think that’s sometimes what needs to be out there, this proof of concept, the proof of possibility. And that was something that I feel like was helpful with these Dear Colleagues, that you’d lay out the law and the provisions in the law that you were wanting to highlight, but also examples of where there were places that were already taking advantage of some of the things that you were pointing out. Are there any that you’d want to highlight today?

Hayley Sanon: One of our very first pieces of guidance was on direct student services, which says states can keep up to 3 % of their entire Title I-A allocation. So all the Title I-A money that goes to the state, to the districts, the state can keep 3% of that and use it to do just what it sounds like, provide direct services to students. Ohio had already been using this flexibility to expand access to high school advanced coursework, but Louisiana called a few weeks ago and said, ‘Hey, we want to implement this for this school year to give more kids high-impact tutoring.’ And again, our point of wanting to get to yes, I put the superintendent and his team on speakerphone, we walked down to our career staff, and we worked through it right there and said, ‘Yep, there’s nothing to stop you from using this this year. Go for it.’ And so they’ve already implemented that and are going to be expanding access to tutoring in their state because of it. So that has been really fun to see.

Unsafe school choice was our next one. This said, states are required by law to have a definition for persistently dangerous schools. They have to have a process for identifying schools as such, and if a school is identified as persistently dangerous, students in that school must be given a public school choice option. So that’s what the law lays out. We know that we have issues around school safety in this country. We had over a million incidents of violent offenses on campus in the past school year alone, according to the most recent data, and yet only 25 schools were identified as persistently dangerous nationwide.

It’s a mismatch. 15 of those came from the state of Arkansas, right? And that is because of the leadership of Governor Sanders and Superintendent Jacob Oliva to emphasize that we need to call unsafe schools what they are and give students the option to find a safer learning environment that meets their needs if they are in one of those. And we’ve seen many other states reach out since that letter, saying frankly, this was something that fell under the radar for them, and they are glad that we highlighted it and are working to update their definition and ensure that their processes are implemented with fidelity.

How do you see the balance of power between the federal government and the states evolving in the next few years? The Dear Colleagues are a start, but do you see this progressing further, significantly further?

Hayley Sanon: We are working to right-size the federal role in education. That looks like supporting states and implementing these flexibilities that we’ve discussed, you know, including exploring ESEA waiver requests to remove some of these provisions that detract from student achievement. There are things around overhauling competitive grant programs. So this is where we really get into rulemaking. We have a plethora of competitive grants that are run out of our office. Typically, to receive funds through a competitive grant, that usually means hiring grant writers, working through the competition, doing the performance reporting, all the things that come with it, that’s just a whole separate workload. Then your formula funds, which you get by nature of a formula, right? We do the math, we figure out your piece of it, we send it to you. That’s the formula side, competitive side. It’s all these hoops that you have to jump through, and usually, a lot more administrative cost in order to just receive the grant.

Can you give examples of both formula versus competitive grants?

Hayley Sanon: Title I-A would be a formula program. The statute explains how money gets doled out and provisions about how does the state then give it to districts, how do districts give it to schools. A competitive grant… one example I like to highlight is the Comprehensive Literacy State Development Grant. That’s a big one. It is a multi-million dollar, multi-year grant to states to overhaul and improve their literacy work. We’ve seen it really be a tool for some of the work we’ve seen around the science of reading. But that’s what I find sad about it, as I have state superintendents who come to me and say, ‘We finally, after years of applying, received this literacy grant.’

It should all be literacy money, right? You shouldn’t have to wait around to hope that one day you get granted one of these competitive awards just to really be able to meaningfully work on this literacy. And it’s why it’s been great to see state efforts to bolster this. But that’s where the Trump administration really believes in simplifying our funding programs in order to streamline this to make this easier for states. I like to point out that an average school’s budget, about 8% of it comes from the federal government. And some people are sometimes surprised to hear that while we’re only 8% of an average school’s budget, my office alone for K-12 education has over $29 billion that comes through over 60 different programs. 60 programs —formula, competitive kind of this mix — and those are 60 distinct reporting requirements, monitoring protocols, application requirements, and you can imagine by the time it gets to the school level, each of these is a teeny piece of the puzzle, other than Title I-A, which is substantial.

Not only are there all these different sources of funding and all these reporting requirements and plans that have to be put in place and compliance obligations, there are also different funding years. So it gets incredibly complicated and very staff-heavy to comply.

Hayley Sanon: Yes, most people don’t realize when we receive funds from Congress, we give them out to a state for our big formula programs what we call multi-year funds. States receive their Title I-A money, for instance, on July 1st and October 1st. But when they receive them, they have 24 months to spend those dollars. Currently, right now, states are able to spend their FY 25, so Fiscal Year 25, their Fiscal Year 24, and their Fiscal Year 23 Title I-A funds, and then those close at the end of each fiscal year. But at any given point, you could be doing up to three years of different spending, reporting, and monitoring for your formula funds. It’s quite the headache.

Quite the headache, lots of opportunities to get in trouble, too. So I would imagine it restricts innovation and creativity because you are again so focused on compliance and ensuring that you’re getting the dollars out the door without getting in trouble, the forms back, the compliance reports back, without getting in trouble.

Hayley Sanon: And when we say getting in trouble, I think it’s important to emphasize we have no levers to withhold money if students can’t read or do math. If there is a school that is ultimately failing to educate students and to drive academic achievement and make sure that they hit these proficiency rates and are on grade level, we have no action. We have no recourse for that.

We do obviously have recourse when it comes to violating civil rights law, those sorts of things, and then nitpicking over a lot of these provisions that are not related to student achievement, but we don’t actually have anything to get at that accountability piece of when students are not able to read proficiently, which is why we really think about returning education to states because we don’t have the power here. And we’ve tried, right? We’ve tried even larger federal roles through No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, etc, that didn’t work. And so we have been that way before. It has not served students well. What we’re currently doing is clearly not serving students well, as the most recent NAEP scores show, right, the Nation’s Report Card.

And so really moving forward, it’s thinking about how do we empower states, districts, and parents to make the best decisions for their students because ultimately parents are the ones who know their students needs the best.

How do we do that, Hayley? … Dear Colleague letters and look at opportunities for flexibility, consolidation of funds, and addressing things on the funding side. There’s also this waiver opportunity that might be coming up for states that choose to apply for waivers.

Hayley Sanon: The Elementary and Secondary Education Act does create a waiver authority for the Department of Education to waive any statutory or regulatory provision with the exception of [certain] things. Examples include equitable services, which is how you get services to students in private schools who would otherwise be eligible for support under a program. Supplement not supplant requirements, so how do you make sure that these funds are on top of what you would already be spending from the state and local. So those sorts of provisions we cannot waive. But everything else is essentially fair game. If a state can make the case that by waiving a provision, we will improve academic achievement and have a clear way of tracking that improvement to show that it’s successful. These waivers can be granted for up to four years, and then they can be re-upped as states again show, ‘look, we told you we were going to track it this way, and we’ve shown that that’s correct. We have this proof of concept, and so we’d like this waiver to continue.’ That’s the waiver authority. We see this used in discrete ways. There are typically kind of like one-off waivers around how long funds are available, etc.

We are really pushing states to think about a little more all-encompassing of a waiver, and that was what the letter was getting at is, what are the other things that are truly getting in your way of best-serving students, and how can we support you in writing up a strong waiver request and really driving at this academic achievement piece to best support kids?

From what I understand from state chiefs, as they think about their waiver applications and are starting to draft these, they’re looking for flexibility that’s going to allow them to tailor interventions so that they can ensure that their students’ most urgent needs and the localized needs are met. This is going to free the state up from an administrative burden and hopefully ensure that resources are more student-centered rather than compliance-centered. Would those be some of the big goals?

Hayley Sanon: I think that tracks with what we’ve heard from state superintendents who have really raised this concern about all the different funding streams that I was discussing, where they get resources from and how they are disjointed from one another and actually prevent them from having a holistic strategy for how you’re going to support education. Currently, the way that our funding streams are set up, we are very much planning the funds rather than funding the plan for how we’re going to improve academics.

Also wasting a whole lot of money. There’s a significant amount of federal funding coming to states, but as you said, it is only 8 % of school’s budget on average. But a lot of this money is gobbled up in staff compliance. So wouldn’t it be exciting to see more of the money showing up in the classroom and showing up in student-centered ways?

Hayley Sanon: Absolutely, and changing that culture, right? We talk a lot about the cost of compliance, and the dollar amount… some states have said it’s up to 47 cents of every dollar. The primary focus of the state education agency right now is this compliance work and trying to keep the federal government happy, instead of freeing up the state education agency to be the instructional leaders, to be about pushing decisions down closest to the student, helping identify best practices and spread that and have an improvement strategy, and changing that culture of the state education agency from one where folks are afraid to innovate for fear of, like you said earlier, getting in trouble with some little statutory regulatory provision and getting tripped up over it, instead freeing those people up to think about how can I do this best and how can I rework what we’re doing to better support our students. I mean, that’s a huge shift for the field of education that I think really would be to the betterment of students.

How does all of this feed into encouraging what we already see happening, which is the growth of education freedom, the growth of school choice? Do you see that this shift between the federal government and the states when it comes to education is going to support education freedom?

Hayley Sanon: Yes, that’s the goal, right? We are big believers in ensuring that students have the options that best meet their needs. And for the Trump administration, even one more option for students to get the learning that they need, right? To get those unique services that are tailored to them. That is a good thing. And so we are looking at every lever we can pull to expand education freedom for students. So like I mentioned earlier, some of these flexibilities that get it, you know, offering options and give more arrows in the quiver for state agencies to encourage choice.

The Trump administration is thrilled about the new tax credit scholarships that were part of the Working Families Tax Cuts Act that will really drive opportunities for students to find options that best meet their needs. That’s everything from high-impact tutoring to homeschooling to private schooling. Really, the full gamut of choice is available through that program, and are excited for its implementation and to already see states starting to opt in there and the great things that’s going to do for students.

We also have made a historic investment in the charter schools program. So this year in this fiscal year we have gone to $500 million up from $440 million for the charter schools program. That’s the most we’ve ever put in there. We also spent the summer running all six Charter Schools Program competitions. So the Charter Schools Program has six distinct kind of funding structures underneath it. And so each one requires a competition. We did that. We’ve been very busy and are looking forward to announcing those awards here in the next week. And so that has been great.

One of the competitions that we ran was a brand new Model Development and Dissemination program. So the Department of Education is authorized to create a program aimed at dissemination for best practices in charter schooling. We have this new program that is focused on how do we see more innovation in the charter school sector? How do we see more of these unique models for charter schools?

I always pointed to Alabama Aerospace and Aviation High School, which I think is doing phenomenal things. There are students that are graduating with drone licenses, regular pilot licenses, and just a completely different way of thinking about high school. And they had a hard time getting authorized, right? They were made to jump through a lot of hoops. And so our thought was, how do we create a program focused on dissemination that highlights great entrepreneurs like those, like Ruben, who’s running Alabama Aerospace and Aviation High School, to show that next generation of charter school leaders? How do you get over this hump, right?

And so partnering those sorts of innovators with organizations to model this, to disseminate those things so that we can help encourage this growth even more for charter schools to really be at their full potential of what they can be. And so we’re excited about the awards that are coming for that in the coming days. Yeah.

All right, so we’ve got Dear Colleague letters, waiver applications, suggestions around what can be done when it comes to funding and flexibility, and then exciting things when it comes to the federal scholarship tax credit and the Charter Schools Program.

So, Hayley, sometimes people see the headlines and get a little confused as to what’s going on, and maybe overwhelmed. They don’t have a sense that this is very organized and orderly and systematic. Of course, it is because you are all those things. Where can they go for information to find out more about these developments?

Hayley Sanon: I think staying engaged with the Department of Education — we do have different newsletters to kind of highlight these things. We’re going to be ramping those up even further in the coming weeks and months. I think also not being afraid to reach out, right? We have a phenomenal political team here at the Department of Education who wants to be responsive to stakeholders. I think it is easy to get bogged down in what the headlines say and some of the narratives that are out there, and really appreciate this opportunity to be with you, Ginny, to push back on some of that and show just how strong our team is operating, how much we are executing on the vision of returning education to the states, and are excited to really get towards that ultimate goal of ending the bureaucracy, not the budget, and giving states power over their education systems to best serve students and to fully empower parents to find the options that best meet their students’ needs.

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Listen to the full Freedom to Learn conversation with Acting Assistant Secretary Hayley Sanon on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. If you have suggested questions about returning education to the states that I should ask future guests, send them to podcast@dfipolicy.org.

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