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Dive Brief:
- Determining whether a provision in federal COVID-19 relief funds for schools succeeded in preventing states and districts from cutting funds to high-poverty districts has been difficult due to “incomplete and unreliable” data, a U.S. Government Accountability Office report found.
- GAO’s analysis found that while districts in six states generally identified their poorest schools, the U.S. Department of Education had insufficient data for how the state-level maintenance of equity requirements were used to identify their poorest districts. The maintenance of equity provision was in place for fiscal years 2022 and 2023.
- GAO recommends that the Education Department develop internal written procedures for providing technical assistance for its grants, as well as establish procedures to ensure that data collected for grants oversight is reliable.
Dive Insight:
To help schools, districts and state K-12 systems recover from pandemic-related setbacks, Congress approved nearly $190 billion in Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds across three COVID relief bills. Districts and states spent the money on a variety of programs, including safety initiatives, staff retention and learning recovery initiatives.
The last of that funding is set to expire at the end of this month.
GAO conducted its performance audit of the maintenance of equity provision from August 2024 to January 2026 — a time frame that spanned the Biden and Trump presidential administrations.
Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., requested the GAO study. In a March 3 statement, Scott said it was disappointing GAO could not determine how the maintenance of equity provision was implemented. He also decried the Trump administration’s current efforts to downsize the Education Department.
“This report underscores how dismantling the Department of Education undermines the federal government’s ability to successfully implement education initiatives according to the law,” Scott said.
The Education Department, beginning in July 2021, offered guidance and technical assistance to help states and districts meet the maintenance of equity requirements under COVID relief funding.
Department officials told GAO the guidance was developed and refined at the same time the guidance was being implemented. As a result, the agency did not develop internal written procedures to guide staff in providing the technical assistance, the GAO report said.
The state-level maintenance of equity provision barred states from disproportionately reducing certain funding below fiscal year 2019 levels for high-need districts or the highest-poverty school districts.
The district-level provision prevented districts from disproportionately reducing certain state and local funding to high-poverty schools or disproportionately reducing certain staff levels in high-poverty schools.
When the Education Department’s final rule for the maintenance of equity provision was released in 2022, some state and local education leaders said the rule’s reporting requirements were burdensome, even though they agreed with the overall goal of equitable funding practices.
According to the GAO report, districts generally were able to identify their poorest schools. But at the state level, this wasn’t as straightforward, and sometimes the poorest school in a wealthy district may be better off economically than the wealthiest school in a poor district due to variations of poverty across a state.
When asked by GAO researchers about the data inconsistencies, Education Department officials said they “could not fully access the source documents or other related information that would provide a basis of comparison or verification of the data,” the report said. They also could not confirm if data-reliability procedures were followed to ensure the accuracy of state maintenance of equity data, according to GAO.
The Education Department disagreed with GAO’s recommendation that it develop internal written procedures when engaging in technical assistance, because the agency said it uses a multitiered framework for technical assistance from internal staff and other providers. It also uses internal banks of grantee questions and answers, which are continually refreshed and reviewed by attorneys and senior leaders to ensure consistent technical assistance to grantees, according to what the Education Department told GAO.
The agency did tell GAO that it would consider setting up an internal website for maintaining and sharing lessons learned regarding grant oversight. Department officials also noted that if the lessons learned include information useful to external parties, the agency could share that information through conferences, webinars or by other means.
