jacqueline nowicki, welcome to "washington journal." guest: thank you for having me. host: first, tell me the overall mission of the government accountability office. guest: gao is a nonpartisan congressional agency. we are tasked with providing objective fact-based analysis for both sides of the aisle. gao analyzes and audits programs and provides information to congress for them to use in their decision-making. we are not policymakers ourselves. host: the way your reports are generated, you get a request from a lawmaker or somebody else within the administration to follow-up on this particular issue? guest: correct. like almost all gao work, this work was punted by congressional interest. it is obviously a high interest topic. this specifically was done in response to a request from the house committee on education and labor. host: this report was generated, covering what years? guest: we looked at nationally generalized survey data over a series of years, from about 2014 to the most recent data we used was school year 2018. host: for our viewers and listeners, that

jacqueline nowicki, welcome to "washington journal." guest: thank you for having me. host: first, tell me the overall mission of the government accountability office. guest: gao is a nonpartisan congressional agency.

jacqueline nowicki, how do you begin a report like this? what are you looking for?hat kind of data? guest: in general, the first thing we do is consider what congress wants to know, and like most researchers, we create research questions that are unbiased and objective, that will help us answer those questions or uncover information that would give congress information about what it wants to know, and we look for data that is reliable, available, validated sources. in this case, we used two nationally generalizable surveys. one was a survey of school principals, and the other was a survey of school students. we also talked to federal civil rights groups, the department of education, those sorts of things. host: the headline from the washington post reporting on your report. students have faced a huge jump in hostile behavior. attacks with weapons doubled. one in five students ages 12 to 18 were bullied during the 2017-18 school year. 2018-19, one in four students saw bullying related to race, national origin, religion, disability, gender or sexual orientation. one i

jacqueline nowicki, welcome to "washington journal." guest: thank you for having me. host: first, tell me the overall mission of the government accountability office. gu