Each issue ships with real listings, real rate distributions, and the analysis to make them legible. The point is to give English teachers — and the people who hire them — a clearer view of a profession that has never had decent published data.

English teaching and tutoring exists to help non-native speakers improve their English so they can study, work, and compete in a global economy. That demand is not going away. What's changing is who supplies it, and at what price.

AI is repricing the market and in many segments replacing the teacher altogether. Conversation practice is moving to subscription products at a fraction of an hourly tutor's rate. Assessment and feedback work that paid human raters is moving to AI scoring engines. Some segments are being compressed; others are being eliminated. The teachers and tutors working in these markets are seeing only fragments of the shift from where they sit.

Underneath the AI story is a second force that affects most tutors' incomes more than displacement does: buyer-pool segmentation. Our Issue 1 scan of 1,135 TOEFL tutors across Preply, italki, and Wyzant found a $20 median on the two globally-distributed platforms and a $56 median on the US-anchored one — same credentials, same skills, more than double the rate. The mechanism is geographic. Different platforms aggregate different national buyer pools, and a tutor's existing skills clear at radically different rates depending on which pool they're listed in.

Most published commentary covers only the AI story, and usually badly. Chalk Index measures both forces and shows where they meet.

Issues ship Thursdays. Each one focuses on a single slice of the English-teaching market — a test, a vertical, a platform, a region — and measures it directly.

Each issue includes:

Rate distributions. Real listings, sliced by skill, vertical, certification, geography, and platform. p10, p50, p90 — not anecdotes. Sample sizes and scan dates stated.

Mechanism analysis. Why the numbers are what they are. Whose buyer pool is paying, what AI is doing to which part of the value chain, where new pricing pressure is coming from.

Charts. Editorial visualizations designed to be screenshot-worthy. We treat the charts as primary work, not illustration.

Methodology + what we don't know yet. Every issue states what was measured, how, and what's missing. Corrections are published in the following issue.

The global English-teaching economy in all its forms.

We're starting with the big online tutoring platforms — Preply, italki, Wyzant, Cambly — because their listings are fully public and the rate pressure is most acute. From there we expand:

We don't cover K-12 generalist teaching, university non-English-teaching adjunct work, or other parts of the teacher labor market outside English instruction. The English-teaching segment is large enough on its own.

Every issue ships with charts designed to be screenshot-worthy and editorial in feel — Bloomberg-grade data presentation for a profession that has never had it. We treat the charts as primary work, not illustration.

Chalk Index will not tell you you're going to be obsolete. It will not tell you everything's fine. Both of those framings are content marketing. The reality is colder and more interesting: the rules of the English-teaching market are changing in measurable ways, the data is available if you collect it, and teachers who understand the structure will do significantly better than teachers who don't.

This isn't a community. It isn't a course. It isn't a coaching offer. It's the data publication that should already exist for a market this big — and somehow doesn't.

Every number we publish traces to either (a) our own scrape of public listings, with the sample size and date stated, or (b) a named external source we cite directly. We do not republish industry estimates without sourcing them. When we don't know something, we say so.

There are several things we don't know yet, and we're explicit about them in each issue.

Transacted prices. We measure listed prices, which approximate but aren't identical to what buyers actually pay.

Off-marketplace channels. ETS-affiliated prep, US-based prep companies, university intensive English programs, in-country prep schools in major source countries — these together dwarf the marketplace channels we scrape. Most issues will address only what's measurable from the listings we can reach.

Time-series data. We started scanning in May 2026. We cannot yet make growth, trend, or "rising / falling" claims. Those become available once we have multiple scans separated by months.

Each issue's methodology section names what's missing for that issue.

I'm John. I run My Speaking Score, an AI-powered tool for TOEFL Speaking practice and scoring. The scanner that powers Chalk Index was a byproduct of mapping the assessment market for that work, and I'd rather make it useful to teachers and buyers than keep it behind a paywall. Where My Speaking Score is relevant to an issue's subject matter, I'll disclose it inline — as I did in Issue 1.

Reply to this email and tell me what you teach, where you teach, and what you charge. Aggregated reader replies are how I calibrate what to surface week to week. Nothing you tell me gets published without permission.

The point of Chalk Index is to map the market you're already in. The more readers, the sharper the map.

— John