Today, I submitted a written testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies. Click here to download a full PDF of the testimony.
Chair Capito, Ranking Member Baldwin, and Members of the Subcommittee:
Thank you for the opportunity to testify. My name is Dan Lips. I am a senior fellow with the Foundation for American Innovation, an organization with a mission to develop technology, talent, and ideas that support a better, freer, and more abundant future. I respectfully encourage the Subcommittee to require the Department of Education (ED) and specifically the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to improve transparency about American K-12 public education to help parents across the country choose the best learning environments for their children. In addition, I recommend that the Subcommittee direct ED to make recommendations for improving ED’s Education Innovation and Research (EIR) program to strengthen the return on investment from federal funding spent on research and development activities.
American K-12 public schools are struggling to provide children with high-quality learning opportunities. Meanwhile, historic reforms are underway to give parents the power to choose the right learning environment for their children. According to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, 33 percent of 8th-graders and 40 percent of 4th-graders scored “below basic” in reading, and nationwide reading results continued a decade-long decline. As of June 2025, 19 states have established education choice programs with universal eligibility, and nearly half of American children have access to school choice options, such as education savings accounts. As a result, American parents have more power to choose the right learning environments for their children, which creates an opportunity for teachers and school leaders to prioritize evidence-based best practices in the classroom.
In January, President Trump issued an executive order, Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunity for Families, stating, “It is the policy of my Administration to support parents in choosing and directing the upbringing and education of their children.” The federal government can support American parents in choosing the right learning environment for their children by providing timely and transparent information about K-12 public schools.
To that end, Congress should direct NCES to promote academic transparency about elementary and secondary education by collecting and publishing federally mandated data on per-pupil spending and students’ academic achievement. Further, the Subcommittee should direct ED to provide guidance to state education agencies that annual school report cards should be published by July 1st each year. For example, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires states to publish the “per-pupil expenditures of Federal, State, and local funds, including actual personnel expenditures and actual non personnel expenditures of Federal, State, and local funds, disaggregated by source of funds, for each local educational agency and each school in the State for the preceding fiscal year.” ESSA also directs states to publish information about students’ academic achievement and the state’s testing and accountability systems. However, states publish this information in formats that are difficult for parents and the public to access, and often publish school report cards months after the new school year has begun. The lack of timely and transparent reporting limits parents’ ability to use information to choose the best schools for their children.
Last year, former Institute of Education Sciences Director Mark Schneider described NCES’s failure to conduct timely data collection and public reporting and pointed to best practices from academia:
NCES has never produced timely district financial data and has yet to produce complete school-by-school financials. District financials are released more than two years after the close of the fiscal year, and school-by-school financial pilot data dating back to FY18 have not yet been released. … 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 contrast, teams from Georgetown, Brown, Stanford, and others grab data directly from the source and then convert them into a more standardized format.
If researchers at universities are able to access, reformat, and publish state reported data in a timely and accessible manner, NCES should be able to do the same. Congress should direct NCES to collect and report school district and school-by-school financial data in a timely manner. Specifically, I recommend that the Subcommittee include the following report language in the report accompanying the FY2026 funding bill:
K-12 School District and Public School Financial Data Collection and Reporting—The Committee directs the National Center for Education Statistics to collect local education agency and individual public school financial and related data required by the Every Student Succeeds Act in a timely manner. Specifically, the Committee directs NCES to collect and publish financial data reported by school districts on an annual basis. The Committee directs NCES to publish this information on an annual basis by July 1st to provide parents with information to choose the best learning environment for their children. In addition, NCES should issue guidance to states to provide transparent reporting of federally mandated school report cards and encourage states to publish that information by July 1st.
In addition, the Subcommittee should require ED to provide recommendations for increasing the return on investment from the EIR program. A federally mandated review of the i3 program, which preceded EIR, found that this model for funding education innovation and research provided limited value. A more effective approach could be for ED to award grants to organizations that support the development of open source education technology projects and tools, similar to how the U.S. Agency for Global Media’s Open Technology Fund (OTF) supports the development of internet freedom technologies. Projects funded by OTF have created tools used by billions of people. For example, an Open Education Technology Fund model could provide grants to nonprofit organizations that develop open source and freely available tools and technologies to improve K-12 education. Critically, such tools and technologies funded by a potential Open Education Technology Fund could support parents’ ability to choose the right learning environment for their children, help teachers and school leaders (including both the public and private K-12 education sectors) improve classroom instruction, and support personalized learning and tutoring. All of these could help students recover from learning losses caused by prolonged public school closures during the pandemic.
Thank you again for the opportunity to submit this testimony.
