Research protocol
How we research each state
What the sources are, how a status is assigned, how it is checked, and what this work cannot tell you.
Informational only, not legal advice. Each state page describes what published law and standards say. It is not a legal opinion and it is a snapshot dated by its “last verified” line.
Sources
A status rests on primary sources only: the state legislature or official code site, the state education agency, and the state board of education’s rules and standards. Every claim carries a source link, a verbatim excerpt of 25 words or fewer, the statute section, rule or resolution it comes from, and the date we retrieved it. A copy of a statute hosted by a third party (an association, a mirror, a code publisher) is not treated as primary.
Summaries from advocacy and research groups (for example Next Gen Personal Finance, the Council for Economic Education, Jump$tart and EverFi) are used only as leads and cross-checks. Where one disagrees with a primary source, the difference is recorded on the state page.
Status definitions
Each state gets one value, decided by the K-8 question:
Status key
- K-8 requirement
- A statute or rule requires financial education in at least one grade from K to 8.
- K-8 standards only
- State standards or frameworks include personal finance in K-8, but no mandate to teach it was found.
- High school only
- A requirement or graduation course exists only in grades 9-12. No K-8 requirement was found.
- Study or pilot only
- A task force, study, pilot, or unfunded permission exists, without a requirement.
- None found
- No state-level requirement or standards were found. The searches run are recorded.
- Under review
- Not yet confirmed. Sources found so far are shown and no status is stated.
- Research in progress
- This state has not been researched yet.
“Under review” is how we display a state whose sources conflict, could not be reached, or support only a low-confidence reading. Its page lists the sources found so far and states no conclusion.
Public display rule
A status badge and the “what’s missing for K-8” text are shown only when our confidence is high or medium. High means the operative primary text was read in full. Medium means a primary source supports the status but part of the picture (for example a standards document) could not be read in full. Everything else shows as “Under review.”
Verification
After a state is researched, a separate reviewer, who did not write the record, re-fetches every cited URL, confirms the excerpt appears in the source, and checks that the source supports the claim and that the status is justified. A second automated check re-fetches each URL and searches for the excerpt. Failures and unreadable sources go to a review queue and are not counted as passes.
Our crawler follows each site’s robots.txt, makes at most one request per second to a host, and does not use proxies, logins or workarounds. If an official site blocks automated access, we look for another primary source, such as the state education agency’s own document. If none can be reached, the state stays under review.
Known limits
- Reading law involves judgement. A general statute that says instruction is provided “for all students” without naming grades is quoted and described neutrally; whether it amounts to a K-8 requirement can be arguable.
- Standards documents change, and some are large. A state can have K-8 personal finance content we did not find.
- Some requirements are regulations or board rules, not statutes. We say which.
- The “pending bills” lists are not an exhaustive legislative search; bill pages are often behind bot challenges we do not attempt to bypass.
- Only North Carolina has a records audit of its districts. That audit is a case study, not a national dataset.
Corrections
If a state page is wrong or out of date, report a correction. For questions about the methodology or the data, write to [email protected]. We will check it against the primary source and fix or withdraw the entry.