Recent national test scores show historic declines in American students’ academic achievement in reading and mathematics. While Secretary Linda McMahon may be working to shut down the Department of Education (including by transferring programs and authorities to other federal departments through agency agreements last week), the Trump administration has an opportunity in the meantime: to leverage a decade-old law to, once and for all, establish real transparency about public schools’ performance in the United States.
Ten years ago, Congress enacted the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). This law relaxed federally mandated testing and school reform rules that Congress had established under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and had prevailed during most of the Bush and Obama administrations. While ESSA freed states and school districts from requirements to show annual improvement on state tests, the law maintained requirements that states publish information about public schools’ performance on annual school report cards. Critically, the law also required states for the first time in history to annually report other information, including per-pupil spending data for each public school.
The federal requirement to establish transparency about public schools’ test scores and spending creates an opportunity to assess the return on investment (ROI) in terms of student learning gains across the nation’s 99,000 public schools. In other words, school-by-school spending and test score data can provide insights into how expenditure levels affect schools’ test scores, which can provide meaningful information to parents about school quality and value.
It turns out that states and school districts’ willingness to comply with these transparency requirements—surprise, surprise—has been reluctant, at best.
In 2024, the Center for Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University reviewed states’ school report cards to assess the difficulty of comparing student performance before and after the pandemic. The center’s report revealed “that most states are failing to provide accessible, transparent longitudinal performance data—at a time when parents, advocates, and the general public need it most to address continued pandemic learning loss.”
Two years earlier, the Data Quality Campaign had noted that school report cards “remain difficult to find, use, and understand.” Past reviews have found that states often release statewide school report cards with academic achievement data after the school year has already begun.
State compliance with the federal mandate to provide per-pupil expenditure data for all public schools has also been lacking. States publish their datasets in different formats, making it difficult for the public to access the information.
Georgetown University’s Edunomics team, with a grant from the Department of Education and the Gates Foundation, has been working to collect, organize, and publish states’ expenditure data for several years. This is a valuable service. But it should not require a federal grant and a team of economists to analyze these data and assess public schools’ performance.
Unfortunately, the Department of Education itself has been slow to collect and publish data in a uniform format through the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). According to Mark Schneider, former director of the Institute of Education Sciences, “Much of the problem is that NCES uses an antiquated approach to data collection, issuing a uniform survey that doesn’t match up to different state systems and then waiting for all submissions before releasing datasets.” In August 2025, the Department of Education finally released a comprehensive dataset of public school finance data reported during the 2021–2022 school year, three years after that year concluded.
The Trump administration has an opportunity to improve public transparency about public schools’ spending and performance. First, the department can require states to provide and publish data in a timely and accessible manner. Second, McMahon and her team could require the NCES to prioritize the creation of a public dashboard showing public school spending and performance by state, school district, and schools, and to partner with researchers to create an ROI index using this data to help parents and the public understand how public schools are performing.
Establishing prompt reporting of federally mandated data and starting an ROI dashboard would be useful for several reasons. For starters, more than two dozen states have now enacted education choice programs such as education savings accounts, which give parents the option to choose alternative learning environments to traditional public schools. An ROI dashboard could help them make informed decisions about their best schooling options.
Second, the nation’s public education sector faces significant headwinds. Public school enrollments are projected to drop by three million students, or roughly 5 percent, over the next six years from pre-pandemic highs. The Brookings Institution recently projected that traditional public school enrollment could plummet to between 35 million and 41 million by 2050. The public education sector also faces real fiscal challenges in the coming decades, particularly given the federal government’s unsustainable fiscal path and the country’s demographic trends, which indicate an aging population that may put greater pressure on school budgets. Moving forward, public schools will likely need to do more with less, which will put a greater emphasis on identifying schools that are providing the highest return on investment.
The Trump administration is currently considering a redesign of the Institute of Education Sciences, which is the main R & D and statistical arm of the Department of Education and houses the NCES. While this unfolds, McMahon and Congress should require the Department of Education to set mandated reporting requirements for states to provide school report cards and spending data in a timely manner. Moreover, the Department of Education should direct NCES to establish an ROI dashboard so the public will understand how public schools are performing and so parents can choose the right learning environment for their children.
