Scope and Frame Doctrine

Version 1.0. Issued 21 August 2026. Status: adopted.

1. Why the frame is part of the finding

A coverage claim is only as honest as the frame it is measured against. A file that audits sixty of a state's one hundred and eighty local education agencies and reports percentages without saying so is not incomplete, it is misleading, because silent truncation reads to a reader as coverage. The Index therefore treats the frame as a published element of every state file rather than as an internal working decision. The workbook README carries the frame statement, the frame statement carries the reasoning, and any entity class excluded from the frame is excluded by name with the reason attached.

2. The default frame: exhaustive at the local education agency level

The default is exhaustive. Every local education agency in the state is audited individually, and the roster is established from the state education agency's own current-year directory data rather than from any secondary list. This has held for Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, and Georgia, at frames ranging from Delaware's forty-one to Georgia's roughly one hundred and eighty.

The roster question is itself substantive. States differ on what constitutes a local education agency, and the difference is consequential. Delaware treats each of roughly two dozen charter schools as its own agency, which put every one of them inside the exhaustive frame. Florida treats a charter school as a school within its authorising district, which put the class outside the frame with three statutory carve-outs that had to be established from the statute rather than assumed. Georgia was believed to invert Florida by treating state chartered special schools as their own agencies. In each case the frame followed the finding, and the finding came from the statute.

3. The stated-frame exception

Where an exhaustive frame is not achievable in a single run, a stated frame replaces it. California is the only state to date to have required this, at roughly one thousand local education agencies, fifty-eight county offices of education, more than one hundred Special Education Local Plan Areas, and over a thousand charter schools. The California frame took every county office, every Special Education Local Plan Area, and every district above ten thousand enrollment exhaustively, and drew reproducible systematic samples of smaller districts and charter agencies with the sort order, the interval, and the drawn list all published so the sample can be redrawn identically by a third party.

A stated frame is legitimate. An undisclosed one is not. Three conditions apply. The frame must be published in the workbook README. Any sample must be reproducible from the published parameters. Everything outside the frame must be coded OUT OF FRAME, which denotes a deliberate scope decision, and never NOT AUDITED, which denotes a failure.

4. The deaf and blind boundary

Many states operate Deaf and blind provision inside a single institution, a single governing board, a single appropriation, or a single administrative division. Colorado and Florida run combined campuses. Arkansas abolished its separate Deaf school and merged it into a combined institution in 2025. Georgia runs three schools inside one state agency division.

The rule is that the boundary is drawn explicitly and published. Where the boundary runs around an institution, the exclusion is stated and the blind side is documented only to the extent needed to justify the exclusion. Where the boundary runs through an institution, the shared elements are identified individually, including shared board, shared campus, shared residential facilities, shared leadership, shared appropriation line, and shared outreach arm, and the file states which figures can be separated and which cannot. Where a merged institution has made a previously visible Deaf-only figure unavailable, that loss of visibility is itself a finding and is reported as one.

5. Out of frame is a decision, not a failure

OUT OF FRAME is available only for deliberate, documented exclusions of an entity class. Its use imposes three obligations. The class must be named. The count must be stated, so a reader knows the size of what was excluded. And two carve-outs always survive a class exclusion: any member of the class that is its own local education agency, and any member of the class that publishes Deaf or hard-of-hearing content, which will surface through the agency audits and through targeted checks.

6. Frame decisions on record

Frame decisions taken in completed state files are recorded at LOG-001 and are binding precedent in the weak sense only. A later state may reach a different decision on the same class where the statute differs, but it must say that it has done so and why. The series records where states diverge; it does not manufacture consistency that the law does not support.