The data deaf education never had. In one index.
The National Deaf Education Data Index is a 51-jurisdiction reference on deaf and hard-of-hearing education in the United States, built state by state from primary sources: enrollment and placement, fiscal allocations, and the institutional frameworks that decide who serves a deaf child and who pays. Compiled by Novara Consulting Group under a published evidence standard.
Nobody could answer the first question
How many deaf children does your state educate? Where are they placed? What money follows them, and who actually 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.
Deaf education data is scattered across federal files, state agencies that publish inconsistently or not at all, statutes nobody has read side by side, and hundreds of district websites, some of which no longer belong to the districts. The result is a field where policy, funding, and placement decisions are made on assumptions no one can check.
The Index reads it all, every statute, every data file, every district website, and writes down exactly what is there, exactly what is missing, and exactly where it came from.
Three dimensions, one standard
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.
Enrollment & Placement
Where deaf and hard-of-hearing children actually are
Child counts by disability category, educational environments (regular class, separate school, residential facility), deafblind census figures, and early childhood settings, drawn from federal IDEA data files, national deafblind counts, and state data systems where they exist. Where a state publishes nothing, the Index documents that too, because the absence of a number is itself a finding.
Fiscal Allocations
What money follows a deaf child, and through which door
State funding formulas read line by line for any deaf or hearing weight; named appropriations for state schools for the deaf; tuition, excess-cost, and room-and-board mechanics; federal flow-through; and market-layer instruments such as tax-credit scholarships and education savings accounts, including the ones that have been repealed. Each state file maps its fiscal channels against one standing framework so states can be compared.
Institutional Frameworks
Who actually runs deaf education, under what law
The governing statutes and administrative rules, captured verbatim; which department operates each state school for the deaf; admission rules and whether any audiometric gate exists; regional delivery layers such as special education cooperatives; educational interpreter standards; newborn hearing screening mandates; eligibility definitions; and the commissions, resource centers, and deafblind projects in between.
Findings you cannot see anywhere else
These are real findings from released state files, the kind that only surface when someone reads the whole record. Requesting data gets you the state, the citation, and the evidence behind each one.
A flagship deaf school that answers to the welfare department
In one state, the school for the deaf, one of the oldest in the country, is operated by the human services agency, not the education agency. Its admission rule sits in the welfare title of the administrative code, and every education funding statute flows around it.
A funding formula that never says the word "deaf"
One state's entire school funding statute, over 285,000 characters of law, contains zero occurrences of "deaf", "hearing", or "audiology". Verified by full-text search, recorded with the search itself.
States that publish no count at all
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, how many children it serves, from any state source.
School district domains hijacked by gambling sites
District web audits keep finding official directory-listed district domains that have lapsed and now serve gambling content or ad farms, while the state directory keeps listing them.
The residential channel is disproportionately a deaf channel
In one state, children in the hearing impairment category were about 1 percent of the special education count but over 21 percent of residential facility placements, a ratio visible only when the environments data is read by category.
Scholarship programs that never counted disability
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 permanently unknowable, and the Index records that as a finding.
An evidence standard you can audit
Exhaustive, not sampled
Every school district, charter authorizer, cooperative, and state unit in a state's frame is audited, in one state that meant 923 units, each one read and coded. No sampling, no extrapolation.
Sourced claims only
Every figure carries a year and a source. Nothing is estimated, modelled, or inferred. Where the record is silent, the file says "not published" instead of guessing.
Statutes captured verbatim
Funding sections, admission rules, and interpreter standards are quoted from the served statute text, with retrieval dates, not paraphrased from summaries.
Conflicts recorded, not resolved
When two official sources disagree, both statements are preserved and flagged. The Index does not silently pick a winner.
Verified before release
Each state file ships with a machine-readable workbook, a narrative profile, a verification trail, and a release reconciliation run of scripted checks that must all pass.
Evidence custody
Every state file is backed by evidence captures with provenance blocks and a URL manifest, hundreds of rows per state, so any claim can be traced to the page it came from.
The Index is compiled entirely from public primary sources: federal data files, state statutes and administrative codes, agency publications, and the published pages of every audited district and cooperative. It is independent of every school, vendor, and agency it documents.
Built for people who have to be right
- Researchers and universities who need comparable, sourced state-level data instead of fifty inconsistent websites
- Journalists investigating deaf education funding, placement patterns, or school governance
- Advocacy organizations and Deaf-led groups building evidence for policy positions
- State agencies and legislative staff benchmarking their own state against the rest of the country
- Attorneys who need the statutory and fiscal record behind a placement or funding dispute
- Foundations and funders deciding where investment in deaf education would matter most
- School and program leaders making the case for their own programs with national context
If your work depends on being able to defend a number about deaf education, the Index was built for you.
Data requests are scoped engagements
NDEDI data is provided through paid engagements, scoped to what you need and how you will use it. Fees apply to all data requests and are quoted after a short scoping conversation; fees reflect the depth of the extract, licensing, and any analysis or briefing you ask us to add. Coverage grows state by state; we will tell you plainly what the Index currently holds for the states you care about before you commit to anything.
Single-State Extract
One state's data on the dimension you need, enrollment and placement, fiscal channels, or institutional framework, delivered from the state file's workbook with sources and retrieval dates attached.
Multi-State Comparison
The same measures side by side across the states you choose, funding weights, placement patterns, interpreter standards, governance structures, with the gaps and non-publishing states explicitly marked.
Custom Brief & Analysis
A written brief built on Index data for a specific question: a legislative hearing, an investigation, a grant strategy, a litigation record. Includes the evidence trail behind every claim.
Ask us what the Index knows
Tell us the states, the questions, and the decision or deadline behind them. We respond within one business day with what we hold, what it would take, and what it would cost.
Request NDEDI Data Ask a scoping question →About NDEDI data. The National Deaf Education Data Index is an independent compilation of public primary sources by Novara Consulting Group. It is not a government publication and is not affiliated with any education agency. Index files record what published sources state, with citations and retrieval dates; where sources are silent or conflicting, the files say so rather than estimating. Coverage is expanding state by state, and the current scope for any given state is disclosed at scoping. NDEDI data and briefs are research and decision-support materials, not legal advice.