In June of 2023, the Houston Independent School District was taken over by the state legislature of Texas in one of the most egregious forms of government overreach to exist in this state in some time.
Houston and Harris County, specifically, have long been targets of Republicans that run this state. Governor Abbott pledged to use his $90 million campaign warchest to turn this county red again, angry that for over 14 years now, nothing has made a dent in winning over the county in fair (and unfair elections.)
During the takeover, the duly elected school board was disbanded and replaced with Mike Miles by the TEA, who went on to cherry pick a school board that is not elected to rubber stamp his unpopular agenda to “turn around low performing schools.”
The only problem is, the 4 schools they claimed were low performing, had improved immensely from F ratings during the COVID lockdown to solid B ratings. To say that this was an excuse to take over the biggest school district in the state and one in a solidly Democratic area is an understatement.
Mike Miles started saying that his takeover was a success as early as 2025. Of course it’s easy to declare a success after a mass exodus of both staff and children, who could not trust that the superintendent or his appointed board had the public’s best interest at heart.
Even more scandalous is the fact that Mike Miles owns and operates charter schools in other areas in the country and is directly benefitting from his tenure overseeing HISD, a tenure that was recently extended to 2027.
I bring all of this up to ask: where is James Talarico on this?
His Public Education page on his campaign website lists many things he’s fought against, but as a member of the Public Education Committee and as a seated member in the Texas House, strangely fighting against a takeover of this magnitude is missing from his list of accomplishments.
Harris County is the biggest county in Texas. The most populous, and HISD is the biggest school district in that county. To be silent on an issue affecting a huge number of people he wants to call constituents is astonishing.
Like everything with Talarico, you must look at what he does, more than what he says, and the fact that he doesn’t even saying anything here is striking. It’s arguably his biggest issue, as a self-professed “public school teacher.”
But is he? A “public” school teacher.
Digging into his background, something he’s been somewhat obfuscating is the fact that the middle school he taught at, Jeremiah Rhodes Middle School, is a charter school in a public school district.
Rhodes Middle School became a charter school in 2010, a year before James Talarico began his exacerbating long tenure of 2-years as a Teach for America teacher, in 2011. The fact that this was in a public school district does not erase the fact that he was, in fact, a charter school teacher.
What’s the Difference?
This is a fair question. In Texas, school districts can elect to incorporate a charter school within the district but it is up to the school board to vote on and ultimately approve this course of action.
The charter school company oversees everything from their own budget to making decisions about student populations, including interviewing and accepting students they want to enroll. The only thing that is required is that the charter school has to meet certain educational benchmarks agreed to with the school district.
Charter schools have long touted their success over public schools with data that ignores these very facts: they get to choose their students.
What astonished me most, though, was that James Talarico was only a public school teacher from the beginning of the school year term in 2011 to the end of the school year term in May of 2013. Yet, he classifies himself as a public school teacher and leads with it in every introduction, he’s every done.
In fact, during the only debate between him and Jasmine Crockett, his chief opponent in the Democratic Primary, he introduced himself with:
“Before i was a legislator, I was a public school teacher on the west side of San Antonio in one of the poorest zip codes in the entire state of Texas”
This is intriguing for a man that hasn’t been in a classroom in over a decade.
So, what has he been doing since then? After he retired from a lengthy career as a charter school educator, Talarico went on to become the Executive Director in Central Texas for Reasoning Mind, a non-profit organization that helps schools to implement computer-based math lessons in the classroom, often using AI.
This is also where Talarico’s relationship of working with private organizations that are supported by TEA began, as Reasoning Mind was supported by a grant from the Texas Education Agency, in addition to philanthropic orgnanizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Houston Endowment, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation before being bought in 2018 by Imagine Learning, yet another organization that focuses on AI in the classroom.
As with everything else in Talarico’s profile, the dates of his tenure at this organization are not publicly known, but shortly before Reasoning Mind was purchased, Larry Gonzales, Representative for Texas’s 52nd House District decided to retire before the 2018 general election in November, which created the need for a Special Election in the District.
The filing deadline to be on the ballot was August 23, 2018, and that’s the first time James Talarico enters professional politics as a candidate, and ultimately goes on to become the youngest seated member of the Texas Legislature.
But, after winning the election, and after his first session, Talarico makes a comment about how being a State Representative is a “part time job.”
He’s right in this instance and it is one of the reasons why being in the legislature is out of reach for the every day Texan – very few individuals can take the necessary time off from work during a legislative session that lasts from January until the end of May in odd years, and that’s before potentially having to navigate a special session calendar, as well.
Many legislators do supplement their incomes by becoming consultants in industries where they have voted on and passed legislation, both favourable and unfavourable to the companies they are working with, but only James Talarico did it with a company that takes public funds directly from the Texas Education Agency, which is funny, because the reason he lists not going back into the classroom is because a state representative can’t benefit from public funds.
As early as September of 2109, Talarico announced on his Facebook page that he was working for MAYA as a Consultant. On it’s face this isn’t troubling, but consider the following:
This is alarming because as with nearly everything in his past, James Talarico obfuscates the dates of his work as a consultant for MAYA, but if he was still working with them during this period, a case can be made that as a Public Education Committee Chair, Talarico benefited from public funds being dispersed both directly and indirectly from TEA.
I’ve found all of this out slowly over the course of a few weeks. I’m positive this information is in oppo research sitting on the desk of the Republican U.S. Senate candidate ready to go should he win the election, but even more than that: James Talarico keeps referring to himself as a public school teacher, when he wasn’t employed as a public school teacher and when he last stepped into a classroom to teach more than a decade ago.
From the start, Talarico has built his campaign on a shiny image and very few criticisms or questions have broken through the surface level profiles published in the New Yorker, where he all but says he was called by God to run. or in the most recent profile in Mother Jones.
No one in the media has done their due diligence to critique a man running to be the most powerful Democrat in Texas. They haven’t asked hard questions or if they have, they haven’t been answered. We’re in real trouble if James Talarico becomes the nominee, not just because his professional past is a blank page for the most part, but because across the board, he wants the kudos for not doing the hard work.
From being a public school teacher for two years over a decade ago, to taking credit for an insulin cap that was legislation drafted and passed by Republicans, to working with Republicans to make it more easy to disenfranchise voters in 2021 in order to get more favourable lines drawn for his second House District to not caring that voters in HISD are regularly being disenfranchised from voting for their school board.
Talarico is a shiny package. Scratch the surface. He doesn’t have the depth of knowledge on the issues, he doesn’t have robust policy positions, and we don’t know how he will vote in the US Senate.
More troubling, during this campaign, we have watched as he has aligned himself with MAGA Republicans on Bill Maher, not pushing back or defending the former head of the party whose primary he’s running in. Talarico is a wild card, he’s proud of it.
Back in Houston, the parents of children in 12 schools to be shuttered by TEA’s pick to lead the school district have questions that deserve answers from someone sitting on the Public Education Committee as a Democratic menmber of the Texas Legislature. Talarico has long forgotten those parents in his rush to run for a promotion he has not earned.
Which leads me to wonder, six years from now, will Texans be proud of the choices he makes, should he be elected as the Democratic nominee and actually succeed as the victor on Election NIght in November?
Like everything with Talarico’s past, the future is far too hazy to predict.
