Standing Analytical Constructs

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

1. Purpose

These are the recurring analytical objects the Index measures in every state. They exist because ten state files established that the same structural questions recur regardless of how differently states organise themselves, and that measuring them consistently is what allows fifty-one files to be read as one instrument rather than fifty-one unrelated reports. Each construct below is defined, its measurement is specified, and the current state of the evidence across completed files is recorded so that a new state file knows what it is testing against.

2. Operator silence

Definition. The gap between what a statewide provider says it does and how many local education agencies ever name it.

Measurement. Counted in both directions and reported as both a count and a named list. Direction one: the statewide provider's own published claim about its reach, quoted. Direction two: the number of agencies in frame that name the provider as a Deaf and hard-of-hearing service mechanism, with the affirmative list named outright. Where a state runs more than one statewide provider, the count is run separately for each and the file states whether any agency names more than one.

Evidence to date. Florida: ten of seventy-seven agencies named the state school, eight named the statewide Deaf and hard-of-hearing project, thirty-three named the general special education network, and thirty-nine named none of the three. Delaware: one of forty-one named the state school, and that one was the district that operates it. Colorado recorded near-total mutual silence between school and districts.

3. Publication against identified population

Definition. The share of a state's identified Deaf and hard-of-hearing students who sit in a local education agency that publishes a programme.

Measurement. Requires the state to publish child count by agency. Reported as a count, as a share of the state total, and with every agency reporting a measurable population while publishing nothing named individually.

Evidence to date. Available in Florida only, where the figure was 92.0 per cent, with four named systems publishing nothing against populations of eleven to nineteen students. This is the strongest metric the series has produced and it exists only where the state publishes by agency. It is never estimated where it does not.

4. The placement criteria absence

Definition. Whether any instrument published anywhere in the state supplies a family or a team with criteria, a decision framework, or comparative guidance for choosing between a state school, a district programme, a regional programme, and a private or listening and spoken language placement.

Measurement. A search across the state school, the state education agency, the outreach unit, the coordinating body, the health department, and the private sector, with every source checked named whether or not it produced anything.

Evidence to date. No state in the first ten published an educational placement framework. Florida came closest with a Department of Health family guide comparing five communication modes with explicit advantages and disadvantages, which is a communication mode guide and not a placement framework. The distinction between communication mode and educational placement is a standing analytical separation and the two are never treated as the same object. Georgia raises the question in a sharper form, because a state operating two Deaf schools must divide them somehow, and an unpublished basis for choosing between two arms of the same agency is an absence of a different order.

5. The least restrictive environment by category gap

Definition. Whether a state publishes educational environment or placement distribution disaggregated by disability category, such that the separate-school and residential shares for Deaf students can be seen.

Evidence to date. Absent in Colorado, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, and Georgia. Florida was the strongest candidate to break the streak and did not: it collects the data element and reports it only in aggregate. The streak is stated as a streak in every subsequent file, whichever way it breaks.

6. Believed-fact discipline

Definition. Every state prompt carries a set of propositions marked as believed rather than established. The file's obligation is to verify or refute each one and to record which.

Rationale. The construct exists because beliefs carried into these files dissolve at a high rate. Five consecutive states had a believed language acquisition or milestones provision dissolve on contact: Colorado's turned out to be interpreter title certification, Connecticut's an unbranded guidance mandate that produced a draft seven years late, Delaware's a 2010 bill of rights creating no tool and no committee, and Florida's did not exist at all. Florida's believed statewide Deaf service centre network turned out to have no statutory existence whatsoever.

Measurement. The verification trail carries a section stating, for each believed fact, whether it held or did not hold. The programme-level record of dissolved beliefs is maintained at LOG-002.

7. The rural service question

Definition. Who actually serves a Deaf child enrolled in a small rural district in this state, named as a provider rather than as a mechanism.

Rationale. Every state has an answer on paper and the answers differ enormously in whether they describe a person who visits a child. The question is asked plainly in every state file and answered plainly or recorded as unanswerable.

8. Instrument divergence

Definition. Where two state instruments that ought to agree do not.

Rationale and evidence. Divergences have repeatedly been the most substantive findings in the series. Florida's special education eligibility rule abandoned decibel thresholds in a 2024 amendment while its state school continues to apply a numeric audiometric gate in its own published admission criteria, which is a live divergence between two instruments of the same state. Arkansas's public school information system simultaneously served a live record for an abolished school and refused to recognise the school that replaced it. Divergences are recorded rather than reconciled, and the file states which instrument it prefers and why.

9. Admission criteria

Definition. The published criteria by which a state school admits or declines a student, quoted verbatim.

Rationale. Florida's state school publishes general admission criteria excluding children on grounds unrelated to hearing, including intellectual functioning more than three standard deviations below the mean, an autism-like developmental profile, behavioural risk, and self-care thresholds. That was the single most consequential finding in the Florida file and it came from the school's own published text. Admission criteria are captured verbatim in every state, and where a school publishes none, the file says so and says what was checked.