The Bailey Yard is the largest rail classification yard in the world, stretching eight miles across the western prairie at North Platte, Nebraska. Trains leave Bailey Yard everyday--coal trains, grain trains, manifest trains--and each one represents a train prototype. Minneapolis Public School buildings are like a manifest train, where the boxcars, covered and open hopper cars, gondolas and flat cars equate to the myriad of different spaces required to provide instructional programming in today's schools. Like the rolling stock of the Union Pacific, school buildings are in constant need of capital improvement and capital renewal investment. A robust, data-rich, instructional program-driven method is required to know which building needs attention first and go to the head of the train. Such a method is the Educational Index (EI). EI is a measure of the ability of an educational building to support the educational program it contains. While the process of determining EI includes the assessment and measurement of building characteristics, the assessment is based on instructional programming and is a measure of the relationship between the building and the program rather than simply a measure of building attributes.