A recurring theme of the U.S. Department of Education’s monitoring reports is the struggle for waiver states to implement the required improvements in the lowest-performing schools. And once again, a new monitoring report bolsters this trend.

New Jersey is cited in a report released Friday for not guaranteeing that the lowest-performing priority schools are implementing all of the required turnaround interventions for three years. What’s more, the state doesn’t have the ability to monitor whether all of these schools are implementing all of the interventions in the first place.

Federal officials also flagged New Jersey’s weak school-improvement plans for its focus schools, which are those with the largest achievement gaps.

Also Friday, the department released a monitoring report for Vermont—which is not a No Child Left Behind Act waiver state. And so it’s worth noting that Title I monitoring under waivers isn’t new. The department has issued monitoring reports for other non-waiver states within the last couple of months, including Montana and Nebraska.