Letters, briefs and reports can be shown with their own typography. Automatic keeps that only while none of your settings above ask otherwise.
A fifty-one jurisdiction reference on Deaf education in the United States: how many Deaf and hard-of-hearing students each state identifies and where they are placed, what public money reaches their education and through which instruments, and the statutes, agencies, and boards that decide who serves a Deaf child. Every figure carries a year and a source. Every gap is stated rather than filled. The Index documents publication from primary sources and does not evaluate any program.
What the Index publishes about its own work and the field it reports on.
The agreement that moved special education’s daily work to HHS also covers Gallaudet, NTID and the Helen Keller National Center, and it never says who will keep publishing...
One file per jurisdiction, in file number order from Alabama: the summary figures free to every reader, the full narrative, workbook, and trail under license, every version at a permanent URL.
What the fifty-one files show together, under rules that forbid a ranking: comparability markers, distributions, the reference-year mapping, and one DOI for the baseline.
Every rule the Index runs on, versioned and archived: the three dimensions, the coverage codes, the evidence standard, the release checklist, notice and correction.
A fixed annual share of the cost of keeping your state's file current, which buys the update, a briefing, comparison access, and a named acknowledgment, and nothing else.
How many Deaf children does your state educate? Where are they placed? What money follows them, and who runs the school that serves them? In most states no single public source can answer even one of those questions, and in some states no public source can answer any of them.
Federal reporting aggregates hearing-related categories in ways that dissolve the distinctions that matter, state education agencies publish to inconsistent standards or not at all, statutes have never been read side by side, and hundreds of district websites, some of which no longer belong to the districts, hold the rest. The Index reads all of it, every statute, every data file, every district site in frame, and writes down exactly what is there, exactly what is missing, and exactly where it came from.
Two formulations appear in the same words in every state file, because they are the boundary of what the Index claims.
NONE FOUND is a statement about publication, not about service delivery.
Obligations under IDEA are not evidence of a program.
Every state file is built to the same governance corpus, so a figure in one state means the same thing in another. Three dimensions anchor the collection, and each carries a distinct evidentiary burden.
How many Deaf and hard-of-hearing students a state identifies, where the count is taken and on what date, whether it is published at the district level or only in aggregate, what suppression rules apply, and whether state school populations sit inside or outside the statewide figure.
What public money reaches Deaf education and through which instruments: named appropriation lines, formula funding, federal flow-through under IDEA, categorical and low-incidence grants, tuition and transfer mechanisms, and the voucher and education savings account market, including instruments that have been repealed.
Who is responsible for a Deaf student's education and under what law: the operating authority of each state school with its statute quoted, the coordinating body, the eligibility rule and any audiometric threshold, interpreter standards, language acquisition legislation, the early intervention lead agency, and the regional layer.
Where a state publishes nothing, the file says so, because the absence of a number is itself a finding. Nothing is estimated, modeled, or inferred; every figure carries a year and a source, conflicts are recorded rather than resolved silently, and interpretation is marked as interpretation.
How a state file is builtThese are findings from released state files, stated generically here. The state file carries the state, the citation, and the evidence behind each one.
In one state the school for the Deaf, one of the oldest in the country, is operated by the human services agency and not the education agency. Its admission rule sits in the welfare title of the administrative code, and every education funding statute flows around it.
One state's entire school funding statute, over 285,000 characters of law, contains no occurrence of Deaf, hearing, or audiology. Verified by full-text search and recorded with the search itself.
Some state education agencies publish no child count by disability category anywhere. Families, researchers, and legislators in those states cannot answer the first question about Deaf education from any state source.
District web audits keep finding directory-listed domains that have lapsed and now serve gambling content or ad farms, while the state directory keeps listing them. The Index codes them NOT VERIFIABLE and says why.
In one state, children in the hearing impairment category were about one percent of the special education count but over twenty-one percent of residential facility placements, a ratio visible only when the environments data is read by category.
A nine-figure tax-credit scholarship program ran for six years and was repealed without ever reporting participation by disability category. Whether Deaf students used it is now unknowable, and the Index records that as a finding.
Every school district, charter authorizer, cooperative, and state unit in the state's frame is audited and coded; in one state that meant 923 units. Where an exhaustive frame is not achievable, a stated and reproducible sampling frame is published in its place, and everything outside it is coded OUT OF FRAME.
Statutes are quoted from the served text with retrieval dates; beliefs carried in are verified or recorded as dissolved; scripted checks must all pass. The state-level bodies the file names receive the draft with ten business days to point to any published figure or document it missed.
A person runs the release checklist; the state page goes live at a permanent versioned URL and the release is deposited with a DOI. When the next data cycle publishes, the file is re-audited and every figure and code that changed is stated with its direction.
The Index is longitudinal. Baseline 2024 is the first version of each state file that carries all three dimensions with the figures published through the 2024 reporting cycle. When the fifty-one files carry that label, they are deposited together with a single citation, and every later cycle is read against them: what changed, in which direction, and in whose published record. The change between cycles is the finding the Index exists to produce over time.
The reference-year mapping, which states in the same words what "2024" means for each dimension, is fixed once and repeated in every baseline file so that the label means the same thing in every state.
The register is the live state of every jurisdiction. Nothing appears here that has not passed the release checklist, and every state-level body named in a file is noticed before release with a ten business day correction window.
As of October 9, 2026
No state file has been released on this site yet.
No notice window is open.
Roadmap: 12 jurisdictions have October 2026 as their target month, a plan that moves with the work.
No state file has been released yet.
A licensed file and the free summary carry the same figures. The tier changes what a reader can download, never what the Index says. Fees are fixed, issued on request, and not negotiated by entity size.
| Tier | Who | What |
|---|---|---|
| Public reader | Anyone | The state page: summary figures, the coverage tallies, the state indicators with year and source, the fiscal totals by channel with citation, the method, the register, the DOI, and the correction route |
| State file license | Agencies, schools for the Deaf, universities, researchers, press; a reduced-rate product for Deaf-led and disability organizations | The full narrative, workbook, and verification trail for one state, with that year's update |
| State Partner | The state's education agency, commission, or school for the Deaf | The state file license plus the commissioned annual update, a briefing, national comparison access, and a named acknowledgment with no editorial input |
| National license | Institutions and commercial users, as two defined products | All fifty-one files, the national dataset at unit level, exports, the API, and re-audit alerts |
Terms, the release package, the deposit, and the State Partner share.
Data and licensesState Partners →The Index is one of three documentary instruments Novara Consulting Group LLC publishes under one method, beside the Accessibility Governance Record, which documents what public institutions publish about how they govern accessibility, and the SLAT Index, which evaluates sign language AI and AI interpreting technology. Every jurisdiction is documented whether or not a body in it is a client, a partner, a funder, or a critic of the publisher; no payment alters a figure, a code, or a frame decision; and every file carries a disclosure block. The independence rules, the funding page, and the method advisory group are on the About pages.
