Congress has been actively engaged in efforts to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), most recently amended by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB; P.L. 107-110 ). During the 113 th Congress, both the House and Senate have considered legislation to reauthorize the ESEA. On June 12, 2013, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee considered and ordered reported the Strengthening America's Schools Act ( S. 1094 ) by a strictly partisan vote of 12-10. The House Education and Workforce Committee also considered and ordered reported a bill that would reauthorize the ESEA. On June 19, 2013, on a strictly partisan vote of 23-16, the Success for All Students Act ( H.R. 5 ) was ordered reported. H.R. 5 was subsequently considered and amended on the House floor. The amended version of H.R. 5 was passed on July 19, 2013, by a vote of 221-207. It is unclear whether S. 1094 will be considered on the Senate floor. As part of the reauthorization debate, Congress has focused on the federal role in education, particularly in the area of educational accountability, where federal efforts to hold states, local educational agencies (LEAs), and schools accountable for student achievement and teacher performance are under debate. In these discussions, issues related to the burden that complying with the statutory and regulatory reporting requirements associated with the ESEA have put on state educational agencies (SEAs), LEAs, and schools have been considered. For example, the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education of the House Education and the Workforce Committee held a hearing in 2011 specifically focused on these issues. In addition, in response to a congressional request, the Government Accountability Office found that states and LEAs cited data collection and reporting as being among the most burdensome of elementary and secondary education requirements. The NCLB included a set of accountability based reforms that are inherently reliant on testing, data collection, and data reporting. For example, without the data collection and reporting associated with Title I-A, Education for the Disadvantaged, it would not be possible to determine how well schools, LEAs, or SEAs were performing with respect to improving student achievement for all students, including minority students, English language learners, students from low-income families, and students with disabilities. In addition, it would not be possible to implement the outcome based accountability requirements that are associated with schools and LEAs failing to make adequate yearly progress for a certain number of years if various data collection and reporting requirements were not in place. As many of these accountability based requirements were either implemented for the first time or enhanced through the enactment of NCLB, it may be no surprise that the burden associated with ESEA data collection and reporting, particularly with respect to Title I-A, has increased over time. In other instances, burden is created when states and other entities must apply to receive federal funding or report on the use of federal education funds received. Without this information, however, it could be difficult for the U.S. Department of Education (ED) to award funds to grantees or for ED or Congress to perform oversight functions related to the provision of federal education funds. This report was undertaken in response to concerns about state and local reporting burden having increased in recent years since the enactment of NCLB. It examines the hour and cost burden associated with complying with the ESEA statutory and regulatory reporting requirements associated with 16 information collection packages. In general, there are two ways to measure the burden associated with an information collection package. Federal paperwork is frequently measured in terms of burden hours, which measure in hours the estimated amount of time that would be required to complete the paperwork. Agencies also measure paperwork in terms of dollars (cost burden), which include the annualized costs associated with the hour burden. The first part of the report includes key findings and discusses the methodology used to conduct the analysis and the scope of the analysis. This is followed by a discussion of key findings. The second part of the report discusses the 16 information collection packages that are examined in this report. This includes general information about each information collection package and issues related to the collection of data, as well as the purpose of each information collection package. The next part of the report analyzes the number of respondents, burden hours, and cost burden associated with each of the information collection packages. This discussion is followed by an examination of the federal costs associated with each information collection package. The last part of the report provides a detailed analysis of the burden hours and cost burden associated with the "State Educational Agency, Local Education Agency, and School Data Collection and Reporting Under ESEA, Title I, Part A (accountability issues)" information collection package, including an analysis of this package both pre- and post-NCLB enactment. This information collection package currently has the largest number of annualized estimated burden hours and cost burden among all of the information collection packages examined in this report. Three appendices are included at the end of the report. Appendix A provides information on the data source used to prepare this report. Appendix B provides a copy of the "Supporting Statement for Paperwork Reduction Act Submission," which is submitted to the Office of Management and Budget's (OMB's) Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) when a federal agency makes an information collection request (ICR) (e.g., new collection, revision, extension, no substantial change) for OMB approval. Appendix C provides a description of the statutory and regulatory requirements associated with the "State Educational Agency, Local Education Agency, and School Data Collection and Reporting Under ESEA, Title I, Part A (accountability issues)" information collection package. Below is a summary of key findings from the analysis of the 16 information collection packages included in this report. Across all respondents (i.e., SEAs, LEAs, schools, and other entities), the estimated annualized state and local aggregate annual burden hours associated with responding to each of the 16 information collection packages examined ranged from 200 hours to 4.7 million hours, while the estimated annualized cost of responding ranged from $6,000 to $118.1 million. One information collection package, "State Educational Agency, Local Educational Agency, and School Data Collection and Reporting Under ESEA Title I, Part A" (accountability issues), had both the highest number of estimated annualized burden hours and highest annualized cost burden. Respondents to the 16 information collection packages include SEAs, LEAs, schools, parents, and other entities. The average number of estimated annualized burden hours and estimated annualized cost burden is generally spread across numerous respondents, and the burden placed on an individual respondent for a given information collection package varies. Within information collections there can be substantial variation in the number of underlying reporting requirements or activities that are applicable to a given type of respondent. For a given type of respondent within a single information collection package, the respondent may not have to address every item on a given information collection package, and the cost of responding to the information collection package may vary by item (e.g., the hourly cost of responding to one item may be different than the cost of responding to another item). For example, for the "State Educational Agency, Local Educational Agency, and School Data Collection and Reporting Under ESEA Title I, Part A" (accountability issues) information collection package, there are three types of activities or information that schools may need to address. On average, the annualized burden for each of these activities ranges from 4.8 to 960 burden hours and from $120 to $24,000 per school. While some schools will not need to address any of the requirements, others may need to address one or two requirements. Federal agencies are required to provide an estimate of the annualized cost to the federal government. This estimate must include expenses that would not have been incurred without the collection of information, such as agency review of applications, peer review, monitoring and oversight, collection and analysis of data, and guidance development. Estimated annualized federal costs for each of the 16 collections ranged from $0 to $3.1 million. The information collection package with the largest estimated aggregate burden hours and cost burden is "State Educational Agency, Local Educational Agency, and School Data Collection and Reporting Under ESEA Title I, Part A" (accountability issues) with an estimated 4,710,525 burden hours and an estimated cost of $118,075,705. The purpose of this information collection package, in part, is to meet the Title I-A requirements that SEAs, LEAs, and schools collect and disseminate information to document progress and inform parents and the public about school, LEA, and state educational performance. This information is used to hold schools, LEAs, and states accountable for student performance in accordance with the underlying policies incorporated into the NCLB. For example, identifying achievement and graduation rate gaps between groups of students and then implementing a series of outcome based accountability requirements based on these results necessitates the collection of numerous pieces of data. For the information collection package with the largest estimated aggregate burden hours and cost burden, "State Educational Agency, Local Educational Agency, and School Data Collection and Reporting Under ESEA Title I, Part A" (accountability issues), a more detailed analysis was completed to examine how the burden has changed over time with the enactment of NCLB. The overall number of estimated annualized burden hours for the information collection package prior to the enactment of the NCLB was about 564,000. Following the enactment of the NCLB, the estimated annualized burden hours associated with this information collection package peaked at 7.9 million hours (an increase in burden hours of almost 1,300%).