GAO: Education paused its reviews of how states follow the rules on nearly $27 billion in school aid. Some absentee rates top 100%.

Friends, Proverbs tells the herdsman to know well the state of his flocks. A new Government Accountability Office report says Washington has stopped looking. The U.S. Department of Education suspended its consolidated monitoring of Elementary and Secondary Education Act requirements this year, Stateline reports, and GAO says that puts billions of K-12 dollars at heightened risk of undetected waste, fraud and abuse. Title I, which funds schools with high concentrations of students from low-income families, is about two-thirds of the nearly $27 billion in ESEA funding for 2025. Education officials told GAO they paused the reviews while they develop a new approach, but as of August the department had given no timeline for resuming them and no details on an alternative. "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. The attendance numbers are just as telling. States count chronically absent students over a whole school year but report enrollment from a single date, and GAO found that mismatch produced "unreliable and implausible" absenteeism rates, some over 100 percent. More than 30% of shared-time schools had implausible rates, and in Pennsylvania the figure was 98%. Half the states remain unmonitored on absenteeism reporting. You can want states to have more say over their schools and still want someone checking the books. A new approach is fine. A gap with no end date is not a plan. Friends, set the date, publish the method, and fix the arithmetic before another year of school money goes out the door.