Career Pathways and Teacher Prep Move to Labor: What the FY2026 CPE and TQP Competitions Really Mean

The press release was easy to miss. Buried among a string of workforce announcements, the U.S. Departments of Education and Labor jointly opened two more competitive grant programs under their now-formalized Elementary and Secondary Education partnership. The FY2026 Career Pathways Exploration (CPE) competition closes June 9, 2026. The FY2026 Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) competition closes June 23, 2026. Both are funded out of accounts the Education Department has managed for years. Neither will be administered the way it used to be.

These are the sixth and seventh competitions launched under the interagency framework between ED and DOL, bringing the total number of formal interagency agreements ED has signed with five sister agencies to ten. That count matters because each agreement is structured under 31 U.S.C. § 1535 — the Economy Act — which lets one agency pay another to perform work on its behalf. In practical terms, that means the Department of Labor is now assisting with grant fund management, technical assistance, and program integration for two flagship education grant competitions. The Education Department still owns the appropriations. Labor owns the operational levers.

For prospective applicants — state education agencies, colleges of education, school districts, workforce boards, and the institutions of higher education that partner with high-need districts — the change is more than administrative reshuffling. It is a signal about what the federal government now wants these programs to do.

The two competitions in brief

Career Pathways Exploration (CPE) is a new program leveraging Student Support and Academic Enrichment funds — the Title IV-A block of the Every Student Succeeds Act. CPE makes competitive grants to states to build their capacity to integrate career exploration into statewide career pathways and workforce readiness initiatives. The framing in the official notice is unusually direct: ensure access to opportunities that expose students to real-life workforce realities aligned with state priorities. The issue date is May 7, 2026. The closing date is June 9, 2026 — a four-week window for state education agencies to assemble a competitive proposal.

Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) is the older of the two — authorized in Title II of the Higher Education Act and funded since 2009. TQP is the only federal initiative explicitly designed to strengthen and reform educator preparation at institutions of higher education, with required partnerships between IHEs and high-need schools or school districts. Historical funding levels have ranged from roughly $14 million in FY2018 to $37 million in FY2019, with FY2024 estimated at $25 million across 15 to 17 awards. The FY2026 notice does not yet publish a topline budget figure, but applicants should plan for awards in the $1.5 million to $4 million range over multi-year project periods. Proposals are due via Grants.gov by 11:59:59 p.m. Eastern, June 23, 2026.

The pairing is deliberate. CPE pushes career exploration into K-12 systems. TQP pushes teacher preparation toward the K-12 educators who will eventually deliver that exploration. Read together, they sketch a vertical pipeline from middle school career interest inventories to teacher preparation programs that produce instructors fluent in workforce alignment.

The Labor Department's expanding footprint

It is worth pausing on how unusual it is to see DOL involved in either of these competitions historically. CPE draws from Title IV-A — an ED-administered block. TQP is authorized under the Higher Education Act, traditionally the most ED-coded statute in the federal portfolio. Universities have not generally needed a DOL contact to compete for TQP funds.

That has changed. The interagency agreement formally tasks DOL with assisting in grant fund management and providing technical assistance — meaning DOL staff will be reviewing implementation plans, advising on workforce alignment, and helping integrate the funded work with the broader apprenticeship and pathways ecosystem the administration has been aggressively building. Recent companion announcements — the $90 million Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED) competition transferred to DOL in April, and the $85 million fourth round of State Apprenticeship Expansion Formula grants — confirm a pattern. Educator preparation, student career exploration, and apprenticeship expansion are converging into a single federal portfolio. ED still writes the checks, but the operational logic is increasingly Labor's.

For applicants, this is a different review environment than the one that produced the last TQP cohort in 2024. Expect more questions about labor market outcomes, more interest in how prepared teachers will support workforce-aligned curricula, and tougher scrutiny of any proposal that frames teacher preparation as an isolated academic exercise rather than a pipeline into a regional or state labor market.

Eligibility, in plain terms

For CPE, the eligible applicants are State educational agencies. Local districts and consortia of districts cannot apply directly. State workforce boards, community colleges, and nonprofit intermediaries can — and likely should — be named partners in a state-led proposal. The competitive edge will go to states that can demonstrate existing or planned infrastructure: published career pathway taxonomies, established work-based learning networks, employer partnership agreements, and credentialing frameworks aligned to state priorities. States that are still building this infrastructure should focus their narrative on capacity-building outcomes that survive the grant period.

For TQP, the eligibility structure is unchanged. An applicant must be a partnership that includes at least one high-need local educational agency, at least one high-need school served by that LEA, and at least one institution of higher education with a teacher preparation program. The IHE must include both an arts and sciences division and a school of education. The partnership may also include nonprofits with a demonstrated record of preparing effective teachers and school leaders.

What is new is what reviewers will reward. The FY2026 notice signals priority for proposals supporting Registered Apprenticeships — meaning teacher residency models structured as apprenticeships, with formal sponsor agreements and pathway documentation through DOL's Office of Apprenticeship. Programs that have already invested in apprenticeship registration are best positioned. Programs that have not should begin that conversation immediately, because waiting until award negotiations to formalize sponsor relationships will not be enough.

The strategic moves to make this week

Both windows are short. CPE has four weeks. TQP has six. Both will reward applicants who have already done the underlying work.

If you are a state education agency considering CPE, three steps matter most in the next ten days. First, lock down your data on existing career pathway participation, work-based learning enrollment, and employer partnership counts — the proposal will live or die on whether you can show measurable baselines and credible growth targets. Second, secure letters of commitment from at least one state workforce board, one industry sector partnership, and one community college system. Third, write the proposal around a coherent theory of action for how state-level coordination unlocks district-level career exploration capacity, rather than describing district-level activities the state will fund.

If you are an IHE preparing a TQP application, the critical moves are different. First, formalize or accelerate the registration of your residency program as a Registered Apprenticeship. The application question about apprenticeship integration will be a meaningful scoring factor and a defensible registration timeline matters. Second, ensure your high-need LEA partner agreement covers a sufficient pipeline of placements — both for the residency cohort and the post-program induction support TQP requires. Third, build out the evaluation plan with workforce-relevant outcomes, including teacher retention in the partner district at three years, instructional impact on student career exploration outcomes, and any available labor market signals from graduating cohorts.

What this signals about FY2027

CPE is the more revealing of the two competitions. Title IV-A money has historically been spent locally, on district-level supplemental programming — anything from social-emotional learning to STEM enrichment. Pulling a slice out for state-level career exploration capacity is a meaningful precedent. If the FY2026 round produces visible state wins, expect the FY2027 cycle to expand the carve-out, possibly with formula components that compete more directly with traditional Title IV-A flexibility.

TQP is operating under tighter statutory constraints, so the design changes are more subtle — but the apprenticeship priority, combined with DOL operational involvement, makes it likely that future TQP cycles will require apprenticeship structuring rather than merely rewarding it. IHEs that treat the FY2026 window as a forcing function to complete apprenticeship registration will be positioned for the next two cycles. IHEs that do not will find themselves disadvantaged in a program their grants offices have long considered a reliable line item.

The broader pattern is the one to internalize. The Education Department is not running these competitions the way it ran them five years ago. It is running them with a partner whose priorities, evaluation logic, and operational fluencies are different. Grant seekers who design to that reality have a real opening. Grant seekers who do not will be competing against ones who do.

For the official notices and full application instructions, see Granted News for the companion SEED competition context. The CPE and TQP notices themselves are posted on Grants.gov.