K-12 Education: Actions to Improve Oversight of Key Federal Programs and Address High Chronic Absenteeism

Federal law requires states to track chronic absenteeism to receive Title I funding, but a GAO review found the Department of Education discontinued its most comprehensive monitoring of that and other legal requirements in 2026. With nearly $27 billion in ESEA funding at stake for FY 2025, GAO says the lapse raises the risk of undetected fraud, waste, or abuse across the whole program, not just absenteeism tracking.

GAO also found the department's own method for calculating absenteeism rates is unreliable, since it compares absences counted over a full school year against enrollment counted on a single date. That mismatch produced implausible rates exceeding 100 percent at more than 30 percent of low-performing and shared-time schools, compared to under 2 percent elsewhere.

At least a quarter of K-12 students are chronically absent, a rate the department itself called a key challenge as recently as February 2026. GAO recommended Congress clarify monitoring requirements and told Education to resume comprehensive oversight and fix its data methodology; the department agreed with one of three recommendations and disagreed with the other two.

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