How we check what we publish

We read each rule where the state itself publishes it: Texas rules on the Texas Secretary of State's Texas Administrative Code viewer, California rules in the Department of Social Services' own Title 22 manual. Never a summary, a vendor's copy or an AI answer.

We quote it word for word. Nothing inside a quote is shortened or reworded; when we quote part of a rule, we say which part, and the whole rule is one tap away.

Every quote shows its section number, a link to the official text and the date we read it.

The Texas viewer keeps old versions of a rule at their own addresses, and an old version looks just like the current one. Before we link a Texas rule, we check that the rules on either side of it point to it as the next and the previous rule, so the link goes to the version in force.

We re-read every quoted rule at least every 90 days, and a scheduled check alerts us when a quote on a page goes longer than that. Today the site shows 12 quotes from California and Texas rules, most recently read October 6, 2026.

Our Texas study counts the standards Texas cites most at small licensed child care centers. It adds up three Texas Health and Human Services Commission datasets from data.texas.gov that Texas has dedicated to the public domain (CC0): the citations, the list of licensed operations and the inspections and investigations behind them.

Centers counted: licensed child care centers operating on the day we fetch the data, with a licensed capacity of 15 to 50 children. Before- and after-school and school-age programs are left out, because Texas licenses them under a different chapter of rules.

Each citation counts once. Texas labels the same standard more than one way, so we group citations by the standard's number, not its label. For each standard we count the citations and the centers cited at least once.

We never fetch a center's name, address, phone number, email or director, or the inspectors' notes, so none of it can reach a page. A standard gets its own line only when Texas cited it at 10 centers or more.

A script fetches the data once a month with plain requests and saves the totals in a file we publish with the site. The page reads that file; it never calls the state's servers while you read it. The page prints the date the data was fetched, and a scheduled check alerts us when that date is more than 45 days old.

Every state agency link in our directory of child care licensing forms was opened by our link checker, on the agency's own site, before it was listed, and shows the date it was last opened.

A link the checker can't open says "Link being verified" and links nowhere. We try every link once a month, and a link that's gone comes down.