Dive Brief:

• A special meeting of Indiana's State Board of Education on Tuesday discussed a plan for the state to keep its No Child Left Behind waiver.  
• The U.S. Education Department last month said the state's NCLB waiver could be revoked if it did not fulfill its associated obligations — which include implementing new state standards and a school ratings system — by June 30.  
• According to Chalkbeat, many of the meeting's participants blamed state Superintendent Glenda Ritz for not keeping the board abreast on the state's difficulties meeting the federal government's waiver requirements.  

Dive Insight:

According to Ritz, this year the state implemented two new programs: the Common Core and a system for assessing D and F ranked schools. Ritz contends that these were not part of the Department of Education's assessment of the state's waiver in September since they had only recently started, and that once such programs are included in the state's profile, its waiver status will not be as precarious.

What is confusing about this claim is it places a large chunk of weight on the Common Core, which the state decided to opt out of a few months ago. The week before Indiana received its NCLB warning, it had approved a set of replacement standards. How that might impact its waiver remains unclear, though the new standards are seen by many as being as rigorous as the Common Core standards they replaced..