ED-DOL's FY2026 State Assessments Competition: Two Absolute Priorities Recast What State Tests Must Measure

The U.S. Department of Education published the Notice Announcing the Competitive Grants for State Assessments (CGSA) Program Competition in the Federal Register on May 5, with the formal joint announcement from ED and the Department of Labor coming on May 1. The application notice and instructions were posted to Grants.gov as opportunity 362142 on the same day. Applications are due 11:59:59 p.m. Eastern Time on June 16. An applicant webinar was held May 11. The CGSA program is the federal government's primary competitive vehicle for funding state-level innovation in assessment design, and the FY26 cycle is the first competition since ED and DOL signed the Memorandum of Interagency Agreement that moves operational management of the Elementary and Secondary Education Partnership grants to Labor. The priorities the Department selected for the FY26 cycle do real work: they recast what state assessment systems are expected to measure and how they are expected to report.

CGSA, authorized under section 1203(a) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, has run roughly every two to three years since the early 2000s. Prior cycles funded projects ranging from formative assessment design to through-year assessment pilots, with grantees including state education agencies, consortia of states, and a small number of intermediate research organizations operating with state agency endorsement. The dollar size of individual awards has historically tracked the four-to-twelve-million-dollar range over a multi-year performance period, with the program's annual appropriation in the high tens of millions. What is different about FY26 is not the funding architecture but the priority structure underneath it.

The two absolute priorities

The first absolute priority — Developing Innovative Assessment Item Types and Design Approaches — formalizes a direction that state assessment work has been moving toward for the better part of a decade but that the federal competition has only recently been willing to fund as a primary objective rather than as a sub-component of broader assessment redesign. Item types that fall under the priority include performance tasks, scenario-based assessments, technology-enhanced items, and computer-adaptive testing items that move beyond the multiple-choice and short-answer format that has dominated statewide testing since the No Child Left Behind era. The priority's emphasis on "design approaches" is the more interesting half of the phrase. State assessment programs have spent a generation optimizing item-level psychometrics within a fixed test design paradigm. The FY26 absolute priority signals that the Department is funding work that questions the paradigm itself — not just the items but the sequencing, the scaffolding, the relationship between formative and summative components, and the inferences the resulting score structures are designed to support.

The second absolute priority — Meaningful Learning Opportunities — is more politically loaded language than it appears on the surface. The phrase has been used by the Department in multiple FY26 announcements as a recurring framing for what state-administered programs are expected to deliver. It signals an expectation that assessment work is not separable from the learning experience it claims to measure. Practically, the priority pushes applicants to design assessment systems where the act of taking the assessment is itself instructionally valuable rather than instructionally extractive. That is a higher standard than the conventional assessment program proposal has historically been held to, and it favors applicants who can describe a coherent theory of action linking item design, scoring approach, score reporting, and downstream classroom use into a single instructionally-meaningful loop.

Absolute priorities under federal grant rules mean that proposals must address them to be eligible for funding consideration, not merely to receive bonus points. Applicants who treat either priority as an aspirational add-on rather than as a central design constraint of the proposed work are likely to be screened out before substantive review.

The competitive preference priorities

Three competitive preference priorities sit above the absolute priorities in the scoring stack. Improving Assessment Scoring and Score Reporting is the priority most directly responsive to the operational pain point state assessment directors have been raising for years — that the gap between when students take assessments and when usable score information reaches classrooms remains too long, and that the score reports that eventually arrive remain too disconnected from the instructional decisions teachers need to make. Applicants whose proposed work credibly shortens score-return timelines or restructures score reports to support instructional decision-making will score well on this priority. Generative AI applications to automated essay scoring, constructed-response scoring, and adaptive score reporting are within scope but are not the only path to meeting the priority.

Assessing Student Growth, the second competitive preference priority, returns growth measurement to a central position after several years in which the federal competition framed growth as one of many possible measurement targets rather than a privileged one. Growth measurement in assessment design is technically harder than status measurement, requires longitudinal data linkages that many state systems have built but not optimized, and surfaces psychometric questions about vertical scaling and growth model selection that the field has not fully resolved. The priority signals that the Department will favor applicants whose proposed work advances growth measurement quality rather than treating growth as a secondary use of an assessment system designed primarily for status reporting.

Comprehensive Academic Assessment Instruments, the third competitive preference priority, pushes applicants toward integrated assessment systems rather than standalone instruments. The priority pairs naturally with the second invitational priority — Comprehensive Assessment Systems: Aligned Formative, Diagnostic, and Interim Assessments — and applicants whose existing portfolio includes both summative state assessments and formative or diagnostic components have a real structural advantage in proposing the integrated work the two priorities are designed to encourage.

The invitational priorities and what they signal

Invitational priorities do not affect scoring but signal what the Department finds interesting and what it expects future cycles to formalize. The first invitational priority — Assessment and Data Literacy — points toward work that builds teacher and administrator capacity to interpret and act on assessment results, recognizing that assessment systems are no better than the use that downstream educators are equipped to make of them. The priority is consistent with the broader administration emphasis on workforce-skill-aligned outcomes across both ED and DOL programs and dovetails with the Career Pathways Exploration and Teacher Quality Partnership competitions running in parallel under the same ED-DOL partnership.

The second invitational priority — Comprehensive Assessment Systems — formalizes the through-year assessment direction that several states have piloted under prior CGSA cycles and under separate state-level initiatives. The priority signals that the Department views the through-year direction as the strategic future of state assessment systems but is not yet willing to make it an absolute priority that would foreclose more conventional summative-redesign work in the FY26 cycle.

What ED-DOL co-management changes operationally

The MOU between ED and DOL transfers operational management of grant funds, technical assistance, and integration with other ED assessment programs to DOL. The substantive policy ownership remains at ED. The practical effect for applicants is that the proposal will be reviewed under ED-defined priorities and selection criteria, but grant management, drawdowns, and post-award technical assistance will run through DOL infrastructure. Applicants whose existing federal grant relationships are entirely on the ED side should not assume that the DOL operational layer is a pass-through. DOL grant management procedures differ in reporting frequency, financial system expectations, and technical-assistance interaction patterns, and applicants who have not run DOL-managed grants before should budget for the operational learning curve as a real program cost.

The Department's framing of the MOU and the broader Elementary and Secondary Education Partnership ties the CGSA competition to a coherent set of FY26 priorities — career pathways, workforce readiness, teacher preparation, and now assessment system redesign — all moving through a shared interagency operational layer. Applicants whose proposed work can credibly connect to one or more of the adjacent partnership priorities, particularly the workforce-readiness framing the Department has emphasized, will benefit from being read as part of the partnership's broader strategic intent rather than as a standalone assessment proposal.

What an applicant needs to do between now and June 16

The four-week window between the May 11 webinar and the June 16 deadline is genuinely tight for a competition with two absolute priorities, three competitive preference priorities, and the operational complexity of an interagency-managed grant. The Federal Register notice and the application notice on Grants.gov together run to several dozen pages of priorities, selection criteria, application requirements, and assurances. Applicants should treat the next two weeks as the priority-mapping phase — building a one-page crosswalk between the proposed work and each of the seven priorities, identifying which prior or current work products demonstrate the absolute-priority alignment, and identifying gaps where the proposal needs new design work rather than restatement of existing capacity. State education agencies that have not led a CGSA competition before should engage their state-level psychometric and assessment-design partners now rather than waiting for the proposal draft phase. The 84.368A application notice, the May 11 webinar recording when posted, and the Federal Register notice from May 5 are the three primary source documents.

For state assessment directors who have been waiting for federal funding to support the work their teams have been scoping for years, the FY26 competition is the most direct vehicle they will have in the current fiscal cycle. The two absolute priorities are demanding but coherent. The competitive preference priorities reward the integrated assessment-system work the field has been moving toward. The ED-DOL operational layer adds friction but does not change the substantive policy ownership of the program. Proposals that take the priority structure seriously as a design constraint, rather than as scoring criteria to be retrofitted onto an existing project concept, have a real path to a strong score.