Skip to main content
Add as a preferred source on Google


White House Launches $9 Million Grant Contest to Reduce Assessment Burden

The Enhanced Assessment Instruments Grant program is the next step in the president’s action plan to improve the quality of academic assessments.

The quality of state academic assessments has been under scrutiny for quite some time, and now a grant program from the United States Department of Education seeks to innovate and improve annual assessments. The Education Department is allotting almost $9 million in federal grants for states to effectively report scores and reduce unnecessary testing.

The grant program builds on President Obama’s Testing Action Plan released last year. The plan aims to reform redundant standardized tests that are administered too frequently and fail to effectively measure student outcomes. As the next step in the plan, the Enhanced Assessment Instruments grant program, also called the Enhanced Assessment Grants (EAG) program, offers financial support for states to develop and use more effective assessments.

"The President's Testing Action Plan encourages thoughtful approaches to assessments that will help to restore the balance on testing in America's classrooms by reducing unnecessary assessments while promoting equity and innovation," said U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. in a news release. "This grant competition is the next step as part of that plan, and will help states and districts improve tests to allow for better depiction of student and school progress so that parents, teachers and communities have the vital information they need on academic achievement." 

The Education Department listed other objectives for the grant program:

  • Collaborate with higher ed institutions, research institutions or other organizations to improve the quality, validity and reliability of state academic assessments;
  • Use a variety of measures to gauge student academic achievement;
  • Document student progress over time; and
  • Develop comprehensive academic assessment instruments like performance and technology-based tools to evaluate student academic achievement.

State education agencies and state education consortiums are eligible to apply for the grants. Applicants that address these program objectives "by producing significant research methodologies products or tools, regarding assessment systems, or assessments," will be chosen to receive funding for their projects, according to the department's website. 

Applications are available on Aug. 8. Applicants must submit proposals for the EAG competition by Sept. 22 and winners will be announced in January. Further information is available on the Education Department site.

About the Author

Sri Ravipati is Web producer for THE Journal and Campus Technology. She can be reached at [email protected].

Featured

  • circuit patterns

    Anthropic Intros Lower-Cost Claude Sonnet 5

    Anthropic has launched Claude Sonnet 5, positioning the model as its most autonomous mid-tier offering to date and a lower-cost alternative to its flagship Opus 4.8 system. The company said the model can plan multi-step tasks, operate tools such as browsers and terminals, and complete agentic work at a level that previously required larger and more expensive models.

  • Abstract Network of Blue and Orange Lines

    Tech Industry Leaders Launch Alliance for AI Agent Security

    NVIDIA and 36 other industry partners are targeting agent security across multi-vendor clouds by combining open technologies for workload identity, agent controls, vulnerability scanning, and software supply-chain security.

  • digital brain integrating legal regulation and security interface

    Survey: Agentic AI Moves from Pilot Phase to Production, Bringing Governance to the Forefront

    A new report from Caylent, an AI-focused Amazon Web Services Premier Tier Services Partner, found that enterprises are already moving agentic AI beyond pilots and into production environments. At the same time, organizations are putting strict conditions around autonomy, making governance and control the next major challenge for enterprise AI adoption.

  • Abstract background with digital shield made of data particles glowing blue blocking against cyber attacks

    AI Attacks Push Organizations Toward Autonomous Cybersecurity Defense

    Artificial intelligence is raising the stakes of cyber conflict as attackers use the technology to accelerate reconnaissance, uncover vulnerabilities, and launch attacks faster than many security teams can respond, according to a new report from agentic AI security company Kai.