A report to congressional committees states that the Department of Education's suspension of its most comprehensive monitoring for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) has heightened the risk of undetected fraud, waste, and abuse. The assessment found that the agency is not currently assessing ESEA compliance with Title I fiscal requirements, which comprised nearly $27 billion in funding in 2025.
The GAO identified significant reliability issues in how the Department of Education calculates chronic absenteeism rates. While the agency requires states to report the number of chronically absent students over an entire school year, it uses a single-day enrollment count from October 1 to calculate rates. This mismatch between timeframes has resulted in implausible rates exceeding 100 percent in approximately 2.5 percent of schools nationwide. These errors were especially prevalent in shared-time schools, where over 30 percent of institutions reported implausible rates compared to under 2 percent for other schools.
The report highlights that Education suspended its consolidated monitoring efforts for all ESEA programs in 2026 while developing plans for future activities. As a result, 32 of 51 states have not undergone consolidated monitoring since the strategy was fully implemented in 2019. This reduction in oversight includes a significant reduction in the workforce at the Institute of Education Sciences, where the office responsible for EDFacts data collection saw its workforce decrease by over 85 percent. The Office of Elementary and Secondary Education also saw a 43 percent reduction in its workforce during the same period.
Chronic absenteeism, defined as missing 10 percent or more of school days, is associated with decreased academic performance and higher dropout rates. In recent years, estimates suggest that between one-quarter and one-third of K-12 students are chronically absent. While 36 states have chosen to include chronic absenteeism in their statewide accountability systems as of the 2025-2026 school year, the GAO noted that the Department of Education has only monitored the reporting requirements for about half of the states.
The GAO recommended that Congress consider clearly articulating ESEA monitoring requirements to ensure compliance and deter waste. The report also made three recommendations for Executive Action, including that the Secretary of Education resume more comprehensive monitoring and improve the reliability of chronic absenteeism data by requiring enrollment reporting that matches absenteeism counting methods.
