Most confirmed university entries into the choice sector took the form of running or authorizing a school rather than building a degree. A catalog scan would miss all of them.
The obvious way to ask whether education colleges have responded to portable funding is to search their course catalogs. It is also the way to get the wrong answer.
Across the states examined, the confirmed university entries into this sector are overwhelmingly operating moves — running a school, or holding the charter for one. Arizona State operates schools. Indiana University East engages through its region's charter environment. Florida's universities hold lab-school charter authority, and both UF and FSU run lab schools. Michigan's eight public university authorizers hold hundreds of schools between them.
None of that appears in a course listing. An institution can be deeply committed to this sector, in public, at scale, for thirty years, and register as a null in any catalog-based scan.
This is the methodological difference the Readiness Index is built around: operating and authorizing moves are coded, not just programs. Both are institutional responses. Counting only one of them produces a picture that is not merely incomplete but backwards — it makes the most engaged institutions look like the least.
Cite as: When Money Follows the Child. Where universities engage, they operate. Field Note 02, July 2026. https://www.whenmoneyfollowsthechild.org/notes/02/ Accessed [date].