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In its fiscal year 2027 budget request, the Department of Education proposed a new $2 billion “Make Education Great Again” grant, or MEGA. The pitch is to consolidate programs, prioritize reading and math and send more discretion to states.
But one line in the department’s own budget justification should give parents and policymakers pause. It says the department “would not establish goals and performance indicators” for the MEGA program.
If Washington wants to throw a sprawling set of K-12 priorities in one pot, it needs to say how taxpayers are supposed to know whether the meal was worth the bill.
At its heart, MEGA would consolidate seven formula and 10 competitive Elementary and Secondary Education Act programs into a single state formula grant, with at least 25% reserved for literacy and 25% for mathematics.
That matters because the programs set to be swallowed by MEGA include support for teacher development, after-school programs, state assessments, homeless students, rural schools, school safety, magnet schools, civics, arts education and family engagement.
All are important programs that are being compressed into a budget that sets aside huge chunks for reading and math and leaves less room for everything else. And once those line items disappear into a single grant, the public will have a harder time seeing what states funded, what they skipped and what any of it bought.
That is a strange place to economize, because the federal cost of keeping score is tiny. Public schools spent $818.2 billion in current expenditures in fiscal year 2023, according to the latest national total. Before any of the proposed cuts take effect, the main federal testing-and-data lines totaled $380 million for state assessments, $193.3 million for NAEP and the National Assessment Governing Board, and $121.5 million for federal education statistics. That is $694.8 million all told, or about 85 cents for every $1,000 schools spend.
And yet that sliver buys some of the most important information in American education. As Robin Lake wrote, the newest NAEP results were alarming and pandemic recovery remains uneven. The 74’s interactive on widening achievement gaps shows lower-performing students falling further behind in nearly every state. These are precisely the kinds of problems that become visible only because the federal government mandated metrics.
To be fair, federal education policy has accumulated layers of programs, rules and paperwork; and there is a legitimate argument for giving states more discretion. But even stronger advocates of local autonomy than I have argued for a truer national yardstick so that flexibility does not become opacity. Simpler funding and clearer public evidence belong together.
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The Department’s own documents underscore this contradiction. Under the MEGA proposal, states and districts would still be expected to meet federal reporting requirements under Title I. But the new grant itself would arrive without its own goals or indicators, even as the administration describes it as an “evidence-based” investment in literacy and numeracy.
Some of the programs being consolidated currently have specific purposes and, in some cases, performance measures of their own. Comprehensive Literacy State Development Grants, for instance, are explicitly targeted to literacy and report performance information. Under MEGA, that specificity would give way to a much broader grant with no specified performance indicators.
This is especially hard to justify because the budget would not only merge programs but also hollow out dedicated measurement lines. A federal line for state assessments would disappear into MEGA even as states are still expected to keep testing and reporting. The budget would cut federal education statistics from $121.5 million to $42.2 million and reduce NAEP and the National Assessment Governing Board from $193.3 million to $137.3 million.
MEGA is still only a budget request, and Congress rejected similar cuts last year. But proposals like this matter because they reveal what Washington now considers the tiny slice of education spending focused on accountability as dispensable. Programs such as school safety, rural education, homeless students and family engagement would have to compete inside the unreserved share of MEGA.
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If the administration believes states can do more with fewer federal silos, then it should welcome a short public scorecard showing where the money went and what improved.
That scorecard need not be complicated. Congress could require states to publish their MEGA plans in a common format and report a short, comparable set of outcomes for reading, math, attendance, graduation and subgroup performance. None of that would prevent flexibility. It would simply ensure that outcomes remain visible. No one should have to reverse-engineer state budgets to find out whether a grant marketed as a literacy investment actually strengthened reading outcomes.
The administration says MEGA would move decision-making closer to home. Fine. But if the money moves closer to home, the metrics should move with it. Policymakers and researchers need a short public scorecard and a common reporting template. If MEGA is going to remake federal schooling, it can do what schools ask of children every day. Namely, show your work.
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