By Ariel Taylor Smith, Senior Director of the NPU Center for Policy and Action
A new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, requested by a bipartisan group of members of Congress, examined how the federal government tracks chronic absenteeism in K-12 schools. Its findings deserve attention from anyone weighing the case for dissolving the Department of Education, because they describe in detail what the federal monitoring function actually does and what its absence would cost.
Chronic absenteeism affects roughly one in four American students, with 22.6 percent reported missing a substantial amount of school days in 2025 across the 44 states and the District of Columbia that submitted data. Thirty-six states incorporate the measure into the accountability systems that determine which schools are identified for support under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). It is among the most consequential figures in American education policy, and according to GAO, it is not currently reliable.
The reliability problems are extensive and compounding. States calculate chronic absenteeism using different methodologies, with no uniform federal standard, which makes cross-state comparison unsound. Some schools have submitted figures that are simply implausible, including attendance rates exceeding 100 percent, without the errors being caught. Federal data arrives approximately 39 months after the school year it describes, meaning that a student who was chronically absent in kindergarten is in third grade before the federal record reflects it.
Compounding the data problems, in 2026 the Department suspended consolidated monitoring – the process through which it periodically examines whether states are implementing ESSA as written. GAO calculated that at the pace of reviews conducted between 2019 and 2025, a given state could expect federal examination roughly once every 15 years.
It is worth being precise about the timeline here, because the weaknesses GAO identifies did not begin this year. More than half of states had not received a comprehensive ESSA review since 2019. The monitoring system was already under-resourced and behind schedule well before the current reductions in force, and any argument that federal oversight was functioning adequately until recently does not survive the report’s own evidence.
But it’s also clear that the problem has gotten substantially worse since Secretary McMahon embarked on her “final mission” of dismantling the Department of Education, launching a series of extensive and careless layoffs throughout the agency. The Office of Elementary and Secondary Education has lost 43 percent of its staff. The Institute of Education Sciences, which produces the research base that tells districts which interventions work, has lost 85 percent. These are the experts who review state accountability plans, track whether Title I dollars reach high-poverty schools, and help district leaders figure out which reading and math programs raise student scores. ESSA gives states flexibility that comes with a promise to low-income students, English learners, students with disabilities, and students of color that someone will ensure that schools are serving them well. Parents need a strong U.S. Department of Education with the staff and expertise to keep that promise and point every district toward strategies that raise student achievement. A department running on a skeleton crew cannot do that job, and our kids cannot afford to wait while it tries.
Now is not the time for the Department to be pulling back on monitoring. Over the past year, the Department of Education invited states to apply for waivers from ESSA. So far, seven states have received one, and each of them is statutorily obligated to report on how their waiver improves student academic achievement. The question is: will anyone be left at the Department to ensure states report on how their waiver supports students? Time will tell.
The Department declined two of GAO’s three recommendations. It has said it will issue a new monitoring plan and nonbinding guidance, but it declined to require states to adopt a common methodology for measuring absenteeism. Departmental officials have stated that oversight across ESEA programs continues notwithstanding the suspension of consolidated monitoring. That may be accurate. It is also difficult to confirm from outside the agency, which is the underlying problem GAO identifies: the process designed to make implementation verifiable is the process that has been suspended.
Without this GAO report, parents would have no way of knowing that the U.S. Department of Education has not monitored half of the states, that seven of the states it did monitor had findings related to chronic absenteeism, or that two of those states never addressed those findings. The GAO produced this report because Congress required it, and the results point directly to the solution.
The GAO raised concerns about the Department’s decision to pause monitoring, but has no power to make the Department resume it. That authority belongs to Congress. However, the report supports three clear steps. First, Congress should write clearer monitoring requirements into statute instead of leaving the scope of federal oversight to an agency in the middle of an attempted dismantling. Second, states should adopt a common definition of chronic absenteeism, through either a federal requirement or an interstate agreement, so families can compare how their schools measure up. Third, the Department should restart consolidated monitoring, as recommended in this GAO report, on a schedule that produces reviews more than once per generation.
Congress has a window to act right now. Before the ink dries on the FY 2027 appropriations process, lawmakers should require the Department to comply with GAO’s recommendations.
The National Parents Union has never argued that federal administration is beyond criticism, and GAO’s account of a system that reviewed fewer than half the states in six years is not a description any of us should defend. What the report establishes is that the remedy for inadequate measurement is better measurement. Families making decisions about their children’s education require accurate information delivered while it is still actionable, and that information does not assemble itself.