A federal watchdog agency warned that billions of dollars in K-12 education funding face increased risks of waste and fraud after the U.S. Department of Education suspended its comprehensive monitoring process this year.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report highlighting significant gaps in federal oversight of state compliance with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The agency stated that the suspension prevents the department from systematically assessing whether states are following approved plans or meeting federal requirements.
Monitoring Suspension Leaves Oversight Gap
The Department of Education halted consolidated monitoring to develop a new approach for reviewing ESEA compliance. As of August, the department had not provided a timeline for resuming reviews or details on alternative measures to ensure state accountability.
“As a result of suspending consolidated monitoring, Education will not be able to systematically assess whether states are complying with ESEA requirements and following their approved state plans,” the report said.
Consolidated monitoring was fully implemented in 2019. Currently, half of all states remain unmonitored for reporting requirements that apply to every state receiving federal education funds.
Financial Stakes and Title I Funding
The financial implications of the oversight gap are substantial. Total ESEA funding reached nearly $27 billion in 2025. Title I funding, which supports schools with high numbers of low-income students, accounts for about two-thirds of that total.
States receiving Title I funds must develop statewide accountability systems and report data on chronic absenteeism. The Education Department defines chronic absenteeism as missing 10% or more of school days.
Data Reliability Concerns
The GAO raised serious concerns about the reliability of federal absenteeism data collected from states. The agency found that mismatched timeframes in how schools report data have led to unreliable and implausible results.
States report chronically absent students over an entire school year but calculate total enrollment based on a single date. This discrepancy creates statistical anomalies, particularly in schools with fluctuating enrollment.
“Calculating rates using mismatched timeframes has resulted in unreliable and implausible chronic absenteeism rates (e.g., rates over 100 percent),” the GAO said.
Some schools reported absenteeism rates exceeding 100%, a mathematical impossibility that indicates significant data collection errors. These discrepancies were most notable in low-performing schools, those housing career and technical education programs, and shared-time schools.
State-Level Data Discrepancies
The report identified specific patterns in the flawed data. More than 30% of shared-time schools had implausible chronic absenteeism rates. In contrast, under 2% of other schools reported such errors.
Among Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI) schools, nearly 13% had implausible rates over 100%. About 2% of schools not in the CSI category showed similar data issues.
The GAO highlighted Pennsylvania as a case study for these problems, finding that 98% of shared-time schools in the state had implausible chronic absenteeism rates. Conversely, several states reported no shared-time schools with implausible rates. Idaho was among those states, along with Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, and Rhode Island.
Persistent Absenteeism Challenges
Data reliability issues complicate efforts to address chronic absenteeism, which has remained elevated following the COVID-19 pandemic. Estimates suggest that at least one-quarter of K-12 students were chronically absent in recent years.
The GAO’s findings underscore the difficulty federal agencies face in tracking student attendance accurately when state reporting methods vary and monitoring is suspended. Without systematic reviews, the department cannot verify if states are correctly identifying and addressing absenteeism trends.