How we verify, date, and re-check every fact
Staleness is the failure mode that actually hurts someone here. A teacher who relocates on an out-of-date requirement suffers real harm, so currency is the product rather than a nicety.
Where facts come from
- The statute or administrative code first, where one governs. Rules carry their own effective dates and amendment histories, which is how we know when something changed.
- The agency's own pages second, for procedure, fees, forms and published timelines that rules do not fix.
- Never a secondary guide. Not another directory, not a test-prep blog, not a university's advice page — those are the things we check, not the things we cite.
Even official sources go stale, and we say when they have
Two examples we found and published rather than quietly working around: Florida's education department hosts a copy of its own certification rule that cites a statute repealed in 2002; and the Texas Secretary of State's Administrative Code site has moved, breaking every deep link published before the move. Both are flagged on the relevant state pages.
Every fact carries two things
A source and an as-of date — the date a person actually read that source, not the date the page was generated. They are rendered inline on the fact, not collected in a bibliography at the bottom where nobody checks them.
Facts older than 120 days are shown with a visible staleness badge rather than being silently left in place.
What we do when a rule is genuinely unclear
We say so, set out the argument each way, and give you the agency's number and the exact question
to ask. We label it ambiguous_confirm_with_state.
This is deliberate, and it is the hardest part of the product to sell. A free guide will give you a confident answer to these questions. The confident answer is worth less than nothing, because the questions that are unclear on the published record are precisely the ones with money and a move riding on them — a nonrefundable fee, or the difference between a seven-year licence and a one-year authorization.
The archive
Every cited page is captured and date-stamped before it is used. That archive is what makes the quarterly re-check a diff rather than a re-read, and it is the evidence behind the update promise.
A limitation, stated because the archive is load-bearing. Outbound HTTPS is blocked from the machine this site is built on, so HTML pages are archived as visible-text extractions with the source URL and capture date in a header, rather than byte-exact HTML. Rule PDFs and the federal statistical files are byte-exact. Text extraction is sufficient for diffing — arguably better, since it strips the navigation chrome that generates false diffs — but it is not byte-exact and we would rather you knew that.
The quarterly re-check
Each covered state is re-verified quarterly: fetch the archived URLs, diff against the archive, review what changed, decide whether it is cosmetic or substantive, regenerate affected pages and packs, and notify anyone holding an affected pack.
The change rate is high. Of the first three states researched, two changed materially inside a single quarter — Texas amended its out-of-state certification rules effective 2 August 2026, and Colorado's SB26-126 removed a long-standing experience requirement. Neither change was reflected in any free guide we examined. The record is at what changed, and when.
Scope is capped on purpose
We cover fifteen corridors, not all 2,450 state pairs. Maintaining the full matrix to this standard would take about five hours a week; fifteen corridors takes about one. A smaller honest product beats a larger stale one, and staleness here is the cardinal error rather than a quality issue.
What we will not do
- Fabricate a value. A figure the source does not publish is shown as unknown, never as a default or a plausible-looking estimate.
- Advise. We publish “this state requires X, cited, as of this date”, never “you will be certified”.
- Sell around a known doubt. A pack whose re-check fails is pulled from sale until it is fixed, and its buyers are told.
- Market on fear. No “don't lose your career”. The facts are quite enough.
Our own computation
One dataset on this site is ours rather than an agency's: the estimate of how many teachers move between each state pair. Its method, assumptions, weaknesses and scripts are published in full at teacher migration corridors, so anyone can re-run it and disagree with it precisely.