When a Teacher Crosses State Lines, Does the Record Follow?

Most teachers will never have a disciplinary record. When USA Today examined the system in 2016, it put the share of disciplined educators at under 1 percent of the nation's more than 3 million teachers.

The problem is the small number who do lose a license, and how easily that record gets left behind. A revocation in Georgia doesn't automatically show up in a hiring file in North Carolina. Schools have a name for what happens next: passing the trash.

What the data shows

Educator misconduct is hard to measure, and the research is thin. The only federally commissioned study, a 2004 literature review led by Charol Shakeshaft for the U.S. Department of Education, estimated that 9.6 percent of students in grades 8 through 11 had experienced some form of sexual misconduct by a school employee, ranging from unwanted comments to physical contact.

Nearly two decades later, the picture hasn't improved. A 2023 multistate survey of 6,632 recent high school graduates found that 11.7 percent reported at least one form of educator sexual misconduct during K-12, most often sexual comments.

The costs are real. California's attorney general said this year that the state paid as much as $3 billion to student victims of abuse by school employees between 2019 and 2023.

How records slip between states

Teacher licensing runs state by state, with 50 different sets of rules. The national backstop is the NASDTEC Clearinghouse, a database of disciplined educators that depends on states to report into it.

That reporting has gaps. USA Today's 2016 investigation found at least 9,000 disciplined educators missing from the Clearinghouse, including about 1,400 who had permanently lost their licenses, at least 200 of them over sexual or physical abuse. In one case it documented, a teacher disciplined in Georgia went on to get licenses in both South Carolina and North Carolina. South Carolina caught it through a Clearinghouse update. North Carolina didn't. NASDTEC responded by ordering state audits and opening the Clearinghouse to school districts.

Federal investigators found the same pattern. A 2010 Government Accountability Office review of 15 cases in 11 states found that in 11 of them, the offender had previously targeted children, and in at least six, the offender abused more children after being hired. In several cases, schools let offenders resign quietly rather than pursue charges.

Policy is still catching up. A 2022 Department of Education study found that every state requires criminal background checks for educators, but only 27 require employers to also check employment history, eligibility and disciplinary status. The paper trail is easy to bury, too. As of 2022, 35 states had no law barring schools from suppressing misconduct information in termination, resignation or severance agreements, and 40 didn't prohibit expunging it from personnel files.

In July 2026, the Department sent states and districts a Dear Colleague letter on the practice and opened 20 targeted investigations into schools it suspects of passing the trash. The letter cited at least 67 California cases where the state didn't revoke an educator's license even after a district found misconduct. Some states are pushing toward transparency: in June 2026, Texas launched a public educator misconduct dashboard that breaks cases down by offense.

The record a criminal check can't see

Here's the gap that matters for hiring. A criminal background check only catches conduct that reached a courtroom. Many educator cases never do. They end in a license action instead: a suspension, a revocation, a reprimand, a consent order or a voluntary surrender, often negotiated so the teacher can leave quietly.

Those actions live in state licensing records, published in 50 different formats, from searchable portals to spreadsheets and PDFs. A district hiring from out of state would have to know where to look, and then look in every state the candidate has worked.

Where Ferretly fits

Ferretly's Teacher Sanctions search brings those records into the same report as social media screening. It searches official, state-published educator disciplinary records across all 50 states, including revocations, suspensions, reprimands, consent orders and voluntary surrenders, and returns source-linked results the school can verify with the issuing state.

A few details hiring teams will care about:

• Works in FCRA mode. For pre-employment screening, Teacher Sanctions is the U.S. search that stays on when FCRA mode is enabled.
• Runs on basic identifiers. It needs a name, a state, and an age or date of birth.
• Pairs with criminal and registry checks. Outside FCRA workflows, organizations can also turn on National Criminal Database and Offender Registry searches from the same settings card.
• Available on Enterprise plans or with the Global Sanctions add-on.

Teacher Sanctions results sit alongside what Ferretly already reviews: publicly available social media activity, where boundary-crossing behavior can surface long before it becomes a license action. Our earlier look at teacher-student misconduct covers that side of the picture.

As with everything Ferretly reports, these are findings, not decisions. Ferretly shows what the records say and where they came from. The school decides what it means for the role.

Closing the gap

No single database solves passing the trash. But the fix starts with a question every district can ask about a candidate: has any state ever taken action against this person's license? Now you can answer it in the same report you already run.

See how Teacher Sanctions works alongside social media screening. Talk to our team.