Education Discretionary Grants

Congress set aside 1.7 billion for 88 discretionary grant programs in fiscal year 1999. In awarding this grant money to state and local education agencies, school districts, colleges and universities, and other organizations, the Department of Education relies on the results of peer reviews, in which a panel of experts evaluate the merit of grant applications. GAO found that the Department has corrected some past weaknesses that have plagued its peer review process, but others remain that could affect its actual or perceived fairness. The Department rarely analyzes peer reviewers' feedback, tracks peer reviewers' performance, or assesses the implications of variations in average scores among review panels. A greater effort in these areas could help the Department identify problems and improve its peer review process.

GAO noted that: (1) Education's redesigned grant awards process has helped the agency improve the timeliness of awards and provide better service to applicants and grantees; (2) as a result of the redesign, Education provides a greater percentage of new awards earlier in the year, which allows grantees more time to prepare for implementing their projects; (3) also, Education has made grant information more available and accessible to applicants and increased grantees' flexibility to make certain administrative changes to their projects without prior approval; (4) Education's peer review process, which in fiscal year 1998 cost approximately $2.4 million for the nine programs GAO reviewed, has many of the management controls necessary to help ensure that reviewers fairly assess the merit of applications; (5) for example, Education seeks to select peer reviewers who have relevant experience, requires them to certify they are free of actual or perceived financial conflicts of interest, and trains them to apply evaluation criteria to score the merit of grant applications; (6) however, weaknesses in some management controls could raise concerns about the fairness or perceived fairness of the process; (7) for example, Education generally does not require reviewers to certify that they have no nonfinancial conflicts of interest (that is, personal and professional conflicts) and it lacks guidance to assist officials in dismissing poorly performing peer reviewers; (8) moreover, few of the programs assessed the effectiveness of management controls to ensure that the process was conducted fairly; (9) for example, although several programs collected information about the peer review process, few analyzed peer reviewers' feedback on their review experiences or tracked the performance of reviewers; (10) also, none of the programs assessed the effect that some peer reviewers' scoring variations had on applicants' chances to receive funding; (11) grant awards for the programs GAO reviewed were generally consistent with peer review scoring, with funds typically awarded to applicants with the highest peer review scores; (12) awards also were consistent with legislative objectives for each program and specific measurable objectives, where specified; and (13) about half the grantees in one of these programs and about one-third in the other had 5 to 20 times the national average number of students with limited English proficiency.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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