Education Across the States
The go to place for any issue having to do with education across the nation
We asked every state education agency in the country — plus the District of Columbia and the five U.S. territories — for the same core records. Everything they produce is published here, in full, free: the spending ledgers, the grant files, the monitoring reports, the complaint decisions. This is the collection, and it is open to anyone who wants to check the work — ours included.
The same ten items, of every agency, in electronic form where it exists: the check register and purchase orders; agency credit-card records; the payroll listing; adopted budgets and budget-versus-actual reports; federal grant files — IDEA Part B allocations to districts, OSEP monitoring reports with the state's responses and corrective action plans, and determination letters; state complaint and due-process hearing decisions, as the agency keeps them; copies of any and all vendor contracts signed, regardless of dollar value; state board minutes; and the agency's organizational chart. Same questions everywhere, so the answers can be compared.
The full index is the Document Register in the Education Records Repository — every document, the request that produced it, and the date it arrived. Every document carries a Register ID (for example, ERP-NH-0001).
Cite as: Education Records Project, Register ID ERP-[XX]-[seq], [document title], [agency] production of [date], Education Across the States.
Already in hand: the New Hampshire Legislative Budget Assistant's State Aid to Cities, Towns, School Districts — FY Ending June 30, 2026 (Register ID ERP-NH-0001). A statewide corrective-action production from the New Hampshire Department of Education (request RTK-2026-62) is in flight, expected December 31, 2026.
This collection is built to be used. The records are public records — we claim no copyright in them, and you need no one's permission to use them for any purpose. Our register, indexes, and analysis are free to use with attribution to the Education Records Project, Education Across the States.
If you are a journalist or an academic and you publish from this collection, cite the Register ID and link the entry — that is all we ask, and it is how the next researcher finds the document. If you are planning work from a production, you are welcome (never required) to tell us at educationacrossthestates@gmail.com; we link published work that draws on the collection, because the point of asking was for the records to be read.
The register also documents how each agency behaved when asked — acknowledgments, delays, denials, and fee demands are logged as part of the record. Access is the story as much as the documents are.
As productions arrive, we normalize them — always per-pupil or per-capita, never raw totals across jurisdictions of different sizes — and publish comparisons with a full methodology note: sources, denominators, caveats, and what would change the result. A ranking we cannot defend does not publish. Where a state or district dramatically outperforms, we say so, we look at what they are doing differently, and we ask their people to explain it on the record. Where one falls far short, the documents get the same attention.
Requests go out in waves — Wave 1 (the District of Columbia, the five territories, New Hampshire, and ten states) in the week of October 26, 2026; the remaining states in the two weeks after. The request log, including overdue clocks and refusals, is kept in the project's tracker and summarized here as productions land.