The Education Department Now Has Seven Supplemental Priorities. They Are Worth Up to 20 Points, and Three Competitions Already Stack Them.

Most coverage of the Department of Education's supplemental priorities has treated them as political statements. That framing misses what they actually are. A Secretary's Supplemental Priority is a regulatory instrument published in the Federal Register under 34 CFR 75.105, and once it is final, the Secretary may attach it to any discretionary grant competition the Department runs — as an eligibility screen, as a bundle of extra points, or as a stated interest carrying no points at all.

Seven of them now exist. They were established across five notices between September 9, 2025 and May 22, 2026, and as of the FY2026 competition cycle they are no longer theoretical. Three competitions announced this spring stacked two or three priorities each. In a competition with two competitive preference priorities worth a maximum of 10 points apiece, 20 points move on top of a 100-point technical score — enough to reorder a slate.

Here is the full inventory, the mechanics that determine how much each one is worth, and what the stacking pattern in FY2026 tells you about writing for FY2027.

The seven priorities and where they came from

Notice one — September 9, 2025 (90 FR 43514) established three priorities simultaneously:

• Promoting Evidence-Based Literacy
• Expanding Education Choice
• Returning Education to the States (RES), which carries an unusually specific set of subparts naming the entities whose involvement satisfies it: state educational agencies, governors, state workforce development agencies, state vocational rehabilitation agencies, state higher education agencies, entities identified by a governor or chief state education official, Indian Tribes and tribal organizations, and consortia of the above.

Notice two — February 12, 2026 (91 FR 6625) established Meaningful Learning Opportunities.

Notices three and four — April 13, 2026, published in the same issue of the Federal Register, established two priorities effective May 13, 2026:

• Advancing Artificial Intelligence in Education (91 FR 18774), which drew over 300 commenters
• Career Pathways and Workforce Readiness (91 FR 18780), which drew 176 commenters

Notice five — May 22, 2026 (91 FR 30291) established Promoting Patriotic Education, effective June 22, 2026. It drew more than 5,000 commenters — roughly seventeen times the AI priority and nearly thirty times the career pathways priority. That disparity is the single clearest signal in the record of which priority is contested and which are broadly uncontroversial.

The mechanic that actually decides the money

Every one of these notices carries an identical "Types of Priorities" section, and it is the part applicants should read first. When ED invites applications for a competition, it designates each priority it is using as one of three types:

Absolute priority (34 CFR 75.105(c)(3)). The Department considers only applications that meet the priority. This is not a scoring adjustment — it is an eligibility gate. An otherwise excellent application that does not address the priority is not scored.

Competitive preference priority (34 CFR 75.105(c)(2)). The Department either awards additional points depending on the extent to which the application meets the priority, or selects an application meeting the priority over an application of comparable merit that does not. The point-award version is the common one, and ED has been assigning a maximum of 10 points per CPP.

Invitational priority (34 CFR 75.105(c)(1)). The Department is "particularly interested" in such applications but gives them no preference. Zero points. This type is easy to over-invest in and it is where a meaningful amount of applicant effort gets wasted every cycle.

The same priority can be any of the three in different competitions. Patriotic Education can be an absolute priority in one program and an invitational priority in another. You cannot infer the weight of a priority from the priority notice. You can only get it from the competition notice — the Notice Inviting Applications — and that is the document to read line by line before you scope a project.

One more provision matters and is routinely missed. Each notice states that the Secretary "may choose to use an entire priority for a grant program or a particular competition or use one or more of the priority's component parts." These priorities are lettered and sub-numbered precisely so that ED can invoke a slice. The AI priority has two lettered branches with eleven sub-items each. A competition can invoke (b)(iii) alone — AI to support early intervention and special education services — and an application addressing the other twenty-one sub-items scores nothing.

What FY2026 competitions actually did

Three FY2026 Notices Inviting Applications published this spring show the stacking pattern clearly:

• Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED), announced April 20, 2026 — competitive preference priorities: Returning Education to the States, Advancing AI in Education, Career Pathways and Workforce Readiness.
• Comprehensive Centers, announced May 13, 2026 — competitive preference priorities: Returning Education to the States, Meaningful Learning Opportunities, Promoting Evidence-Based Literacy.
• National Professional Development Program, announced May 20, 2026 — competitive preference priorities: Promoting Evidence-Based Literacy, Returning Education to the States.

Read those three lists together and one fact jumps out: Returning Education to the States appears in all three. It is the connective priority of this cycle. Whatever else a competition is about, RES is likely attached to it.

That has a concrete design consequence. RES is satisfied structurally, not rhetorically. Its subparts name entities — an SEA, a governor's office, a state workforce agency, a state vocational rehabilitation agency, a state higher education agency, a tribal government, a consortium. An applicant satisfies RES by building the project's governance and delivery model around one of those entities, with a documented partnership, not by adding a paragraph about state control. If you are a nonprofit or an institution of higher education planning an ED application for FY2027, the partnership conversation with your SEA or governor's office needs to happen months before the NIA posts, because letters of commitment cannot be manufactured in a two-week application window.

Note also which priority is absent from all three lists: Expanding Education Choice did not appear in this set, and Promoting Patriotic Education could not have — it did not take effect until June 22, 2026, after all three notices published. Expect Patriotic Education to surface in FY2027 competition notices, and expect the humanities- and civics-adjacent programs to be where it lands first.

The AI priority is broader than its name

Applicants read "Advancing Artificial Intelligence in Education" and assume it is for edtech developers. The final text says otherwise. Branch (a) covers AI literacy — integrating AI concepts into teaching practice, including "how to detect AI-generated disinformation or misinformation online," expanding age-appropriate AI and computer science in K-12, embedding AI into teacher preparation, dual-enrollment AI coursework, and industry-recognized certification programs. Branch (b) covers AI use — supporting gifted and talented students, students below grade level, children with disabilities and their families, personalized and differentiated instruction, teacher training and evaluation, reducing administrative burden, and high-impact tutoring.

The final rule also revised the definition of AI literacy in response to comment, landing on: "the knowledge and skills that enable humans to critically understand, evaluate, and use AI systems and tools to safely and ethically participate in an increasingly digital world." That word critically is doing work. A project teaching students to evaluate and interrogate AI output satisfies this priority as squarely as a project deploying an adaptive learning platform. Districts and nonprofits without a technology product have a real path in here, and most of them do not realize it.

Career Pathways is similarly wide. Its subparts reach apprenticeship intermediaries, pre-apprenticeships, registered apprenticeships for in-school and out-of-school youth, talent marketplaces and learning-and-employment records, financial tools that let students compare entry and mid-career earnings across pathways, and — notably — short-term programs built to meet the Workforce Pell Grants eligibility requirements in Section 83002(b) of the Working Families Tax Cut Act (Pub. L. 119-21), including its program-length requirements and the requirement that programs align with high-skill, high-wage, or in-demand sectors as determined by the governor of the state where the project is located. That is a live, statutorily anchored hook, and community colleges building Workforce Pell-eligible programs should be citing it by section number.

What to do before FY2027 notices post

Read the priority notices, not the summaries. The lettered structure is the map of what counts. Summaries flatten it.

Do not scope a project to a priority until you know its type. Absolute means build around it. Competitive preference at 10 points means address it substantively and label it explicitly so reviewers can find it. Invitational means mention it and move on.

Build the state partnership now. RES is in everything, and it is the one priority that cannot be written into an application at the last minute.

Label your priority responses. Reviewers score CPPs against a checklist. An application that addresses a priority throughout the narrative without naming it invites a reviewer to miss it. Use the priority's own language and cite the subpart you are meeting.

Watch for component-part invocation. When a competition notice invokes a slice of a priority rather than the whole, the winning applications are the ones that answer the slice.

This architecture sits inside a broader year of grant-rule turbulence — the OMB Uniform Grants Regulation rewrite that Congress nullified through December 11 in Section 157 of the FY2027 CR, and an IES grantmaking restart beginning October 1, 2026. The supplemental priorities are the piece of that landscape that is already final, already effective, and already scoring applications.

If you are trying to work out which ED competitions your organization actually fits — and which priorities each one is carrying this cycle — Granted can turn a scattered set of Federal Register notices into a short list you can plan a year around.