K-12 spending, absenteeism programs face risks as feds stop key monitoring, watchdog says

Filed 3h ago · Via Stateline · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Geoff Charles · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

The Government Accountability Office found that the Education Department's suspension of consolidated monitoring for Elementary and Secondary Education Act requirements puts billions in Title I funding at heightened risk of undetected waste and fraud. Officials told GAO the process was paused while a new approach is developed, but as of August offered no timeline or interim safeguards.

The report also found chronic absenteeism data unreliable nationwide, with mismatched reporting timeframes producing rates over 100 percent in some schools, especially shared-time schools and low-performing ones. In Pennsylvania, 98 percent of shared-time schools had implausible rates, while several other states had none, suggesting the data problem is inconsistent enforcement rather than inevitable.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

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Pausing the monitoring system while you 'develop a new approach' is the kind of line that sounds fine until you notice nobody set a date to finish developing it. Meanwhile the absenteeism numbers are so broken that some schools are reporting more absent students than they have students, which is the kind of arithmetic that ought to embarrass somebody. Nobody seems embarrassed yet.

Source: Read the original at Stateline → Scored: The Builder · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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