The Department’s Compliance with Experimental Sites Initiative Reporting Requirements

The objective of our inspection was to determine the U.S. Department of Education’s (Department) compliance with Experimental Sites Initiative (ESI) reporting requirements.We found that the Department is not complying with ESI reporting requirements. The Department has not published a comprehensive ESI report since the 2010–2011 award year report. The Department published two ESI reports in 2020, but these reports did not satisfy the reporting requirements as they each covered only one experiment, not all recently completed and ongoing experiments. There are 15 ESI experiments that have been implemented by the Department since the issuance of the last comprehensive report that have not yet been reported on by the Department.