Thirty states now fund students instead of systems. An entire research field measures what families do with that money. We measure what colleges and universities do about it — the programs they build or don't, the schools they open, the credentials they create — tracked institution by institution, year over year.
Annual, state by state: does the educator workforce exist to staff what portable-funding policy enables? Preview from the 2026 baseline — 39 institutions coded across 9 states.
What it measures. Not whether institutions should respond — whether and how they have. Building a program and declining to build one are both coded observations. The Index is written so that supporters and skeptics of these policies can cite the same rows.
What makes it different. Catalog scans miss the main event: where universities have entered this sector, they've done it by operating and authorizing schools, not by listing courses. The Index codes both.
Short findings between Index editions. Every note has a permanent address. Free to read and cite.
Polk County contracted a private microschool founded by two teachers who had left a Polk County public school. The Index has coded 21 Florida institutions and found no education-school program built for this sector. Both facts describe the same state in the same year.
District participation in Florida's part-time scholarship marketplace went from roughly one in three to about 75% of 67 districts in twelve months. Texas districts, offered state money for a comparable arrangement, mostly declined. The contrast is the finding.
Coding North and South America turned up a mechanism the school-choice literature barely names: public money paid not per pupil, but against a private school's teaching payroll. Five systems in this hemisphere work that way.
A 2021 law let Florida colleges sponsor charter schools. Four institutions now do. We had coded one of them "nothing found" — because we read its course roster and stopped.
Rigor you can inspect. These aren't values statements — each links to the practice itself.
Every institutional claim carries a live source link and the date it was checked. "Nothing found" is always distinguished from "nothing there."
Engagement is coded separately from evaluation. We track responses, not virtues — the data works for both sides of the choice debate, by design.
When we're wrong, the correction runs here, in this color, with what changed and why. Both of ours are below, newest first, permanently.
We coded the University of West Florida "nothing found." It is a registered charter school sponsor. Our July pass read UWF's School of Education roster, found nothing built for the sector, and coded the institution Tier 0. UWF is listed in the Florida Department of Education's own Directory of Charter School Sponsoring Entities, and its trustees approved it as authorizer of a Somerset Academy charter school. The row is recoded Tier 1.
The error matters more than the row. This Index's central methodological claim is that catalog scans miss the main event, because universities enter this sector by operating and authorizing schools rather than by listing courses. We made exactly that mistake, in our most heavily covered state. The state's own sponsor directory is now part of the method.
An early draft of our baseline claimed no prior systematic scan of colleges of education existed. EdChoice published one in 2023 — Surfing the Pipeline (McShane), with Hanover Research. Our baseline now builds on it, with attribution. The error and this note are permanent parts of the record.
The United States is the young case. Four countries have funded portable education for between 34 and 109 years — the equilibrium cases nobody in this literature has examined.
A clickable world record of where education money has followed the child, and for how long. 175 countries in the data spine. North and South America are now coded in full — including Trinidad's 66-year Concordat, Argentina's subsidy paid against teacher payrolls, and Guyana's 1976 reversal.
The written brief on the four equilibrium cases: the Netherlands since 1917, Sweden since 1992, Chile since 1981, and England’s deliberate move of teacher training out of universities from 2010.
The Netherlands has had the most pluralistic provider system in the world for over a century — and still entered a structural teacher shortage. England moved credentialing off the university campus on purpose, and supply fell. Portability does not produce workforce sufficiency on its own. That is the finding the American debate has not yet absorbed.