WMFC When Money Follows the Child Become a member
About

The other half of the ledger.

An entire research field measures what families do when education funding becomes portable. We measure what colleges and universities do about it.

Mission

To document, without judgment, how postsecondary institutions respond as public education funding becomes portable — producing evidence that educators, families, university leadership, and policymakers on every side of the question can trust and cite.

Vision

A world where the debate over education choice is conducted with a shared, independent record of what institutions actually did — and where no student's educator is unprepared because nobody was watching the seam between policy and workforce.

Why this exists

Thirty states now fund students rather than systems; eighteen do so universally. Roughly 750,000 American children learn in microschools, and more than 70% of the people running those schools are current or former licensed teachers.

The organizations doing the best work in this space each measure their own side of the ledger, and measure it well. EdChoice counts families, programs and fiscal effects. ExcelinEd tracks policy adoption across some forty areas. NCTQ measures preparation quality. NACSA tracks authorizers. AACTE represents and advocates for the preparation pipeline.

Nobody owns the seam — the question of whether the educator workforce exists to staff what the policy has enabled. That question falls between all of them. WMFC exists to occupy it.

Operating principles

Independence

WMFC is not housed within a university, is not the research arm of an advocacy organization, and accepts no funding conditioned on reaching a particular conclusion. Any funding relationships, institutional affiliations, or commercial engagements that could bear on the research will be disclosed on this page as they arise. If that list is empty, it is empty because there is nothing to declare — not because nothing is being declared.

Current disclosures: None. WMFC is currently self-funded and unaffiliated.

What we publish

The Readiness Index

The flagship instrument. Annual, state by state: does the educator workforce exist to staff what portable-funding policy enables? Free to all members, every edition.

Field Notes

Short findings published between Index editions — a single number, institution or pattern, with its evidence. Free to members.

WMFC Briefs

Bespoke intelligence for university leadership, foundations and agencies: your service area, your peer set, program feasibility.

The underlying data

Every coded row, with sources and check dates, downloadable as CSV and JSON. Research that cannot be checked is not research.

Contact

Corrections, challenges, collaborations, and institutional enquiries are all welcome — particularly corrections. If a row about your institution is wrong or out of date, that is the most useful message you can send.

info@whenmoneyfollowsthechild.org