The U.S. Department of Education is proposing to rework a decades-old program charged with helping states and school districts problem-solve and deploy new initiatives, calling the current structure “duplicative,” “confusing,” and “not responsive to state and local needs.”
The federal agency on Monday released a proposal for new priorities and a reworked structure for its Comprehensive Centers program, through which contractors throughout the country work with states and districts in designated regions, and others work nationally on department-determined policy areas.
The document detailing the new priorities, to be published March 3 in the Federal Register, outlines plans for a new national center that offers educators “concierge-style support” as it fields their technical assistance requests and directs them to organizations that can help. And it proposes that contractors operating the nationally focused centers determine their focus areas based on what state and local education leaders say they need.
The Education Department has traditionally determined these focus areas. For the most recent comprehensive center contracts, awarded in 2024 during the Biden administration, they included alleviating teacher shortages, fiscal equity, and multilingualism.
“Through this redesign, the department aims to ensure that states, tribes, and local education communities are the primary voice driving the department’s technical assistance investments,” the document reads.
The Education Department also suggests it could stop the current set of comprehensive center contracts early so it can launch a new competition based on the newly reworked priorities. The current contracts are slated to run through 2029.
In the announcement published Monday, the department linked the comprehensive centers program revamp to Trump administration efforts to “return education to the states”—the mantra the administration has used to explain major staff reductions at the Education Department over the past year and new flexibility for states from federal accountability requirements.
The department will collect comments on the proposed changes for the next 30 days before it finalizes them.
Latest potential shakeup for comprehensive centers
The reworked priorities, along with the potential for an early end to the current contracts, would mark the latest shakeup for the comprehensive centers in the past year.
The Trump administration abruptly ended contracts for 18 of the 20 comprehensive centers in February 2025 during a cost-cutting spree led by the Department of Government Efficiency, claiming the programs promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that President Donald Trump has pledged to eliminate.
Those contracts remained cut until a judge last August ordered them reinstated.
Contracts for the Education Department’s other main technical assistance program for states and schools—the Regional Educational Laboratories, run out of the agency’s research arm—were also caught up in that cutting spree, until they were restored by the same court order.
The regional educational laboratories focus on helping states and school districts in their designated regions apply education research to their improvement strategies, and they support some research of their own.
Both technical assistance programs have been around for decades, and while they carry slightly different focuses and are expected to collaborate, they have come under fire for duplication of effort and even competing with each other to provide assistance.
A report the Education Department released Friday with recommendations for redesigning its research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences, detailed feedback from education and research leaders who noted a lack of clarity on the roles of the two kinds of centers and a tendency for them to compete within regions rather than collaborate.
The report recommended that the Education Department place both technical assistance programs under a single coordinating structure and award contracts for both on the same schedule. Additionally, the report recommended, IES should clarify the research-oriented nature of the regional laboratories’ role to address confusion.
