Background: What is the role of state legislatures in improving public education? Is it to provide funding and standards for student outcomes and then step aside? Or should legislatures and state education agencies also govern how districts educate students? In practice, states hold school districts accountable for academic achievement while also requiring them to prove compliance with a variety of regulations on educational inputs (Cohen et al., 2017). In 2015, in Texas, this traditional approach to regulation was upended. Today, any Texas district with an acceptable academic and financial rating can declare itself a District of Innovation (DOI) and opt out of any regulation that does not apply to the state's charter schools. These districts are still held accountable to student outcomes but may meet those academic standards however they choose. Deregulation advocates argue that regulations restrict schools from tailoring inputs to their unique circumstances and from serving their student populations as those circumstances require (Elmore & Fuhrman, 1995; Hanushek, 2003). On the other hand, many fear that without input regulations, some district leaders would make inappropriate decisions and thereby harm students and increase inequality (Elmore & Fuhrman, 1995). These fears were evident following the passage of the DOI statute as the state's teachers' unions issued warnings to their members and argued that the statute would life "legal protections that…protect students and educators" (Texas AFT, 2021). Purpose: To provide empirical evidence on the role of state education regulation in determining school decisions and student outcomes, this paper uses the Texas DOI statute to shed light on 1) which regulations districts are most enthusiastic to remove (RQ 1); 2) the extent to which deregulation changes local decisions on educational inputs (RQ 2); and 3) the extent to which deregulation impacts student outcomes (RQ 3). Recognizing that equity is of particular concern with deregulation, this paper focuses on gaps in educational inputs and academic outcomes for rural students, economically disadvantaged students, and students of color. Setting and Population: The Texas DOI statute passed in 2015 and was followed by a steady but enthusiastic response from districts. By the 2016-17 school year, 178 districts had claimed District of Innovation status. An additional 509 districts followed suit in the 2017-18 school year, along with 119 districts in 2018-19, and another 102 districts between 2020 and 2022. As of June 2022, 90% percent of school boards have voted to become a District of Innovation. Research Design: One typical approach to assessing impacts with variation in treatment timing is to employ an event study design. However, recent research demonstrates that weighting schemes embedded in these approaches produce biased and unintuitive impact estimates (Goodman-Bacon, 2021). I therefore follow the advice of Callaway and Sant'Anna and estimate the impact of District of Innovation status using a series of difference-in-difference (DID) estimates (2020). This strategy has the advantage of producing well-understood impact estimates while capitalizing on treatment variation and controlling for time-invariant confounders (by controlling for pre-treatment levels) and history effects (by controlling for comparison group trends). The key assumption in this design is that each cohort would have experienced the same change in outcomes as the comparison group, if not for changes resulting from District of Innovation status itself. I probe and address this assumption by 1) estimating the "impact" of District of Innovation status on school-level inputs and outcomes in the years before the innovation plan was implemented; and 2) controlling for observable differences in cohort characteristics. Data Collection and Analysis: My data analysis requires information contained in District Innovation Plans which are posted on district websites. Using web-scraping and natural language processing, I extract from these documents each district's exempted regulations and the date when they become of District of Innovation. I then link my scraped data to an administrative dataset of school-level data from the 2011-12 to 2019-2020 school years. Findings: I find that Texas school districts have responded enthusiastically to the opportunity to opt out of input regulations. Nearly 90% of districts have claimed District of Innovation status and, of these, 87% have exempted teacher certification requirements, 44% have exempted elementary class size maximums, and 42% have exempted the minimum class time requirement. Regulatory preferences are also highly correlated with district geography; rural districts are particularly eager to exempt teacher certification requirements and restrictions on teacher contracts, while urban districts are particularly eager to exempt restrictions on student attendance and responses to student behavior. These distinct responses suggest that district leaders feel that input regulations do not address contextual needs. Yet, despite enthusiastic adoption, I find that regulatory freedom under the District of Innovation statute caused limited changes in observable school inputs. I estimate the impact of regulatory freedom on twelve key educational inputs including the percent of uncertified teachers, out-of-field teachers, average elementary class sizes, and student-teacher ratios. Each of these impact estimates is a relatively precisely estimated zero within the first four years of implementation. Further, though there are substantial gaps in educational inputs among average schools and those serving high proportions of Hispanic, Black, rural, and economically disadvantaged students, the District of Innovation statute did little to either exacerbate or lessen these inequities in the medium-term. Finally, I find a statistically insignificant and insubstantial 3-year effect of the District of Innovation statute on student achievement: less than 0.01 school level standard deviations (SD) in mathematics and reading. Conclusions: Taken together, these results indicate that though school boards are generally in favor of increased regulatory flexibility, this flexibility did not dramatically alter school inputs within four years or school outcomes within three years. On the other hand, there are still stark inequalities in Texas schools. Thus, if policy-makers and activists wish to increase the standard of educational inputs or academic achievement for rural, Black, and Hispanic students, these results suggest that it would be better to invest in alternative levers like accountability, incentives, resources, and improved compliance, rather than deregulation.