MDE Assessment Operations
State as of April 2026: stable operations, an unresolved budget, an unfunded reporting mandate, and a new superintendent whose priorities are not yet known.
Standing thread for the department-level context reported in Session 2 — Michigan Department of Education Update.
Spring 2026 testing
Status quo, with one exception: the new WIN Work Readiness Assessments. WIN will attend the fall TAC meeting and is expected to bring its psychometric team — WIN Work Readiness Assessments at the fall meeting.
Budget
In process at the time of the meeting. Asked whether MDE’s budget would be cut, the answer was that this is an annual occurrence, that the process is early, and that nothing is final.
Benchmark assessments — the unfunded mandate
MDE still reimburses districts for benchmark assessment use. Schools are currently required to report the data, but that requirement is not in this year’s budget.
A reporting obligation without an appropriation behind it is a standing compliance risk: data quality degrades when the reporting is unfunded, and the resulting dataset carries a selection problem that is easy to forget by the time anyone analyses it.
Leadership
Michigan is in the initial period of new State Superintendent Dr. Glenn Malayko, who is focused on gathering feedback from districts. OEAA has had an initial conversation with him about reporting.
That conversation is more consequential than its single line suggests. Three of the five sessions at this meeting turn on reporting decisions: M-STEP Subscore Reporting has a spring decision deadline; M-STEP / Smarter Balanced Concordance is a reporting artifact under active revision; Adequate Growth Targets would require an announced break in trend and a change to what schools see. A new superintendent’s reporting priorities could reopen any of them.
History
| Meeting | What moved |
|---|---|
| Session 2 — Michigan Department of Education Update | WIN introduced; budget in process; benchmark reporting confirmed unfunded; initial reporting conversation with the new superintendent noted |