Method & Corrections

The research question

Do colleges and universities respond, at the program level, to state policy that funds education outside district-run schools? The unit of analysis is the education unit — the college, school or department of education at a degree-granting institution.

What we do

Structured search of each institution's education unit for: microschool, homeschool, school choice, education savings account, private-school leadership, education entrepreneurship, and "non-traditional settings."
Direct verification — live institutional program pages are read in full, not summarised from search results. The Checked date on every row is the date that page was read.
Course-level enumeration where feasible: complete catalog listings, not keyword sampling.
Operating moves are coded, not just programs. This is the methodological difference. Where universities have entered this sector they have often done it by running or authorizing schools — acts that never appear in a course catalog.

The coding scheme

Built for sector	Stated purpose is to prepare, credential, support or operate education outside district-run schools.
Names sector	Institutional text explicitly names private, classical, charter, academy or "non-traditional" settings — or a dedicated school-choice course exists.
Incidental	Reaches these educators only as a side effect, or is explicitly built around district partnership.
Nothing found	No offering identified. Absence of evidence, not evidence of absence.

Limits that bind hard

Comparison states are not a census. Most-likely-case sampling can prove something exists in a state; it cannot prove absence. The West Virginia, California and New York nulls are weak and should not be cited as evidence.
Cases were found by searching for engagement — sampling on the outcome. This biases every explanation the Index offers, and we say so before anyone else has to.
Course-level enumeration covers one institution of 31.
Michigan is two institutions deep. Eight Michigan public universities authorize charters; six are unexamined.
27 of Florida's 28 state colleges are unscanned — and that system is where Florida's charter-authorizing pathway is actually being used.
One possible retrenchment is unproven. Legacy catalogs reference a Nova Southeastern charter-school leadership master's absent from the current roster. Not citable until archives are checked.
Single point in time. Coded July 2026. This space moves fast.

On neutrality

Engagement is treated as an observable institutional behaviour, not a virtue. Building a program for this sector and declining to build one are both coded observations. A reader who believes portable-funding policies harm public education can read the same rows as institutions declining appropriately; a reader who supports those policies can read them as institutions lagging. The categories are written to allow both readings. That is a design requirement, not a disclaimer.

Corrections

When we are wrong, the correction runs on the front page and stays in the record permanently. We do not make silent edits.

Correction 01 · July 2026

An early draft of our baseline claimed that no one had systematically scanned colleges of education for choice-sector programs. That was wrong. EdChoice published exactly such a scan — Surfing the Pipeline by Michael Q. McShane, October 2023, with catalog research by Hanover Research across Florida, Arizona, Wisconsin and Vermont.

It is also the origin of a statistic our draft described as untraceable. It was traceable. Our baseline now builds on that work with attribution. The correction changes what is novel here: the first scan is not our contribution — the questions left unasked after it are.

What would move this forward fastest

Complete Michigan. Six more university authorizers and their education schools — does the Central Michigan pattern repeat?
Take the second reading. Re-measure the 2023 four-state baseline inside the Index, with full attribution to the original.
Read CAEP standards and two state licensure codes to establish whether a choice-sector credential is even permissible.
Look at the mature systems. The Netherlands has funded school choice constitutionally since 1917; Sweden since 1992; Chile since 1981; England moved teacher training out of universities deliberately.

Corrections and challenges welcome

If a row about your institution is wrong, incomplete, or out of date, we want to hear about it — particularly anything marked unverified. Corrections are published, not quietly absorbed. info@whenmoneyfollowsthechild.org

Rigor you can inspect.