Department’s No. 3 Leaving Cleaner Financial House

The Department of Education, whose checkered management record has spanned much of the agency’s history and included employee theft of funds and uncollected student-loan debts, has made steady progress in shoring up its operations, according to federal and outside evaluators.

Some of the credit is going to Undersecretary Edward R. McPherson, the department’s No. 3 official, who has overseen such efforts since his arrival from the Department of Agriculture in April 2004. He said in an interview last week that the department has made significant leaps in creating strong management systems. The last few department audits done by private accounting firms have been clean, he noted.

The federal student-aid office, the arm of the Education Department that operates the massive program of financial assistance for college, was removed earlier this year from a “high risk” list compiled by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the...