The U.S. Department of Education on Thursday proposed an 18-page rewrite of the priorities it may use to judge future discretionary grant competitions, adding new emphasis on student attendance, apprenticeships, foster and kinship care, student parents, school-board governance, cybersecurity and education technology.

The proposal, published November 5 in the Federal Register, would amend four sets of supplemental priorities adopted in 2025 and 2026. Comments are due December 7. The changes are not final, do not create a new grant program and do not guarantee money for any listed activity.

That distinction matters because supplemental priorities are selection tools, not appropriations. The department can apply one or more of them to a competition when the underlying law permits, and the specific notice for that competition determines whether a priority is required, competitive or merely invitational. The department's own grant guide currently lists seven such priorities across five final notices.

A Broader Menu for Future Competitions

The proposal expands the department's definition of education choice beyond schools and scholarships. It would permit future competitions to favor projects that help student parents obtain child care and other supports, improve educational stability for children in foster or kinship care, and connect postsecondary students with talent marketplaces, pre-apprenticeships and Registered Apprenticeships.

It also would add technical, trade and vocational schools to the choice priority, extend charter and home-education technical assistance to Tribal legal requirements, and allow projects endorsed by a tribe's highest-ranking elected official to fit a state-return priority. Separately, it would allow technical assistance connected to scholarships supported by the federal Education Freedom Tax Credit.

For applicants, the practical effect would depend on later competition notices. A community college, state agency, school district, nonprofit or tribal organization could not claim funding from this proposal alone. But once a revised priority becomes final, grant writers would have a clearer federal signal about which designs may receive an absolute preference, extra points or an invitation to apply.

Workforce Pathways Move Closer to Core Instruction

Career preparation runs through several parts of the proposal. The department would encourage mathematics instruction tied to workplace applications identified with employers, add career and technical education to the high-quality instructional-materials priority, and recognize apprenticeships as pathways for preparing teachers and paraprofessionals.

Registered Apprenticeships combine paid workplace learning with classroom instruction, according to the Labor Department. The Education Department's draft would carry that model into teacher pipelines and broader postsecondary choice, while also adding employability skills, financial literacy, digital literacy, resume preparation and workplace expectations to its workforce-readiness priority.

The direction builds on fiscal 2026 grantmaking. In its year-end review, the department said it had prioritized Registered Apprenticeships and short-term employment programs in roughly $1 billion of new postsecondary awards. The new proposal would make those themes available across a wider set of future competitions rather than limiting them to one year's notices.

Attendance and Local Governance Gain New Standing

The draft adds student attendance and engagement to the meaningful-learning priority. It also proposes professional development for school-board members and superintendents on setting measurable academic goals, using data to track progress and incorporating routine outcome monitoring into local governance.

Attendance is a consequential target, but the federal evidence base has measurement problems. A September GAO report estimated that at least one-quarter of K–12 students were chronically absent in recent years, while warning that mismatched enrollment and absence periods can produce unreliable school-level rates. More than 30 percent of certain low-performing and shared-time schools had implausible rates, compared with under 2 percent of other schools.

That makes implementation as important as priority language. A competition that rewards attendance projects would still need reliable baselines, comparable measures and safeguards against crediting programs for changes caused by student mobility or inconsistent reporting. The proposal identifies attendance as an eligible focus; it does not resolve the data weaknesses GAO documented.

Education Technology Gets New Terms and Evidence Tests

The department also proposes replacing “artificial intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” throughout the affected priorities, following a September executive order cited in the notice. The draft says the terminology change is not intended to alter the substantive focus, but it would revise the definition of technology literacy to include understanding how the systems work and how to use them responsibly.

More consequentially, the proposal would add evidence development, dissemination of evidence-informed frameworks and “rigorous and specific” deployment of technology in teaching or student support. The current AI priority already allows tools for personalized learning, advanced coursework, remediation and disability services. The revision would put more weight on how a project is designed, evaluated and translated into practice.

The Educator's Takeaway

For districts, colleges and education nonprofits, the immediate task is interpretation rather than application. The November 5 document is a proposed framework, not a funding notice, and its broad language will matter only when paired with statutory authority and a specific competition. Still, the draft shows where future federal scoring advantages may emerge: attendance, measurable governance outcomes, career-connected mathematics, apprenticeships, supports for student parents and foster youth, Tribal partnerships, cybersecurity and evidence-backed classroom technology. Prospective applicants can use the comment period to identify unclear definitions, data burdens or conflicts with existing program rules. They should not redesign programs solely around the proposal until the department issues a final notice and then identifies which priorities apply to a particular grant.

What Happens Next

The department will accept comments through December 7 and must consider relevant submissions before issuing any final version. The final text could retain, narrow or remove proposed elements. Even then, the priorities would remain optional tools that the department activates competition by competition.

The proposal therefore matters less as an immediate spending change than as a map of future federal preferences. Its reach spans classrooms, workforce pipelines, family supports and local governance, but the real consequences will appear later in application notices, scoring rules and awards. Educators will need to watch both the final priority language and the first competitions that put it into practice.