Texas Education Agency

Based on Wikipedia: Texas Education Agency

In late 2024, Texas became the largest state in America to officially approve Bible-based curriculum for its public elementary schools. The decision, which came with a sixty-dollar-per-student funding incentive, marked the latest chapter in a decades-long battle over what Texas children should learn—a battle that has national consequences far beyond the Lone Star State's borders.

This is the story of the Texas Education Agency, an organization that shapes the education of nearly six million students and, through its enormous textbook purchasing power, influences what children learn in classrooms across the entire country.

The Accidental Empire

The Texas Education Agency, commonly called the TEA, wasn't always the sprawling bureaucracy it is today. Its origins trace back to a surprisingly chaotic educational landscape in mid-twentieth-century Texas.

Before the late 1940s, Texas had a peculiar arrangement. Thousands of school districts existed on paper but didn't actually operate schools. Instead, they simply collected money and paid to send their children to schools run by neighboring districts. It was a bureaucratic maze that served no one particularly well.

In the late 1940s, state lawmakers decided to clean house. They passed a bill abolishing these phantom districts, triggering the largest school consolidation in Texas history. Almost overnight, 4,500 school districts collapsed into 2,900. But the reforms didn't stop there.

In 1949, the legislature scrapped the old State Board of Education entirely and created something new: the Texas Education Agency. The laws that established it—known as the Gilmer-Aikin Laws, named after Representative Claud Gilmer and Senator A.M. Aikin, Jr.—emerged from a peculiar circumstance. The legislature had deadlocked over teacher salaries, so in 1947 they created a committee to study the entire education system. What came out was a complete overhaul.

What the TEA Actually Does

Today, the Texas Education Agency oversees more than a thousand independent school districts and over nine hundred charter school campuses. That's a staggering scope of responsibility.

The agency sets curriculum standards—the specific knowledge and skills students are expected to master at each grade level. In Texas, these are called the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or TEKS. If you've ever heard someone argue about what Texas students should learn about evolution, the Civil War, or American history, they're arguing about the TEKS.

The TEA also administers the state's standardized tests, most notably the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, known by its acronym STAAR. These high-stakes exams determine whether students advance, whether schools keep their accreditation, and whether districts face state intervention.

Beyond testing, the agency accredits schools, distributes billions in funding, oversees special education programs, and manages teacher certification. It even handles something you might not expect: driver's education and defensive driving courses fall under TEA's purview.

One thing the TEA explicitly does not control: private schools, religious schools, and homeschooling. These operate entirely outside the agency's jurisdiction, a distinction that became politically significant in 2024.

The Power to Take Over

Perhaps the TEA's most dramatic power is its authority to seize control of struggling school districts.

When a district shows signs of serious trouble—persistently poor test scores, financial mismanagement, or operational failures—the TEA can intervene. The escalation ladder has several rungs. First, the agency might require a district to submit corrective action plans and regular progress reports. If problems persist, TEA can assign monitors to oversee daily operations.

The nuclear option? The state can appoint a management board that effectively replaces the locally elected school board. The people voters chose to run their schools get pushed aside while state-appointed managers take the wheel.

In extreme cases, the TEA can shut down individual school campuses or even an entire district.

This isn't theoretical. In October 2025, Commissioner Mike Morath announced that the TEA would take over Fort Worth Independent School District—one of the largest districts in the state—replacing its elected board of trustees with state-appointed managers. The immediate trigger was performance issues at specific campuses, but the decision reflected a broader willingness to use state power over local control.

Houston Independent School District, the state's largest, has faced multiple intervention attempts. In September 2020, TEA investigators recommended installing a state-appointed conservator to oversee the district.

The Data Machine

To justify these interventions, the TEA needs evidence. That's where the Public Education Information Management System comes in—everyone calls it PEIMS.

PEIMS is one of the most comprehensive education data collection systems in the country. It gathers information on student demographics, academic performance, finances, personnel, and organizational structure from every public school in Texas. The data feeds into various accountability reports: the Texas Academic Performance Reports, the A-through-F Accountability Ratings, and School Report Cards that give every campus a letter grade from A to F.

This rating system, introduced in 2017, evaluates schools on three main dimensions: Student Achievement (how well students perform on tests and other measures), School Progress (how much students improve over time), and Closing the Gaps (how well schools serve different student populations, including disadvantaged groups).

The COVID-19 pandemic created a notable exception. In 2020, as schools across Texas scrambled to adapt to remote learning, the state declared a "State of Disaster" and waived accountability ratings entirely. Every school in Texas received a "not rated" designation that year.

The Textbook Wars

For decades, Texas wielded extraordinary influence over textbook content across America. The state's enormous purchasing power—Texas was one of the largest textbook markets in the country—meant that publishers designed their books to meet Texas standards. Other states often got textbooks shaped by Texas preferences whether they wanted them or not.

This created a peculiar situation where curriculum battles in Austin had national consequences.

The fights have been fierce. In 2007, Christine Comer resigned as the TEA's director of science curriculum after more than nine years. She claimed she faced pressure from officials who believed she had given the appearance of criticizing intelligent design—the theory that life is too complex to have evolved through natural selection alone and must have been designed by an intelligent being.

Two years later, more than fifty scientific organizations publicly criticized the State Board of Education for attempting to weaken science standards on evolution. The controversy became significant enough to inspire a documentary. In 2012, filmmakers released "The Revisionaries," chronicling the re-election campaign of Don McLeroy, the Bryan dentist who chaired the Board of Education and led its conservative bloc. PBS later aired an abridged version.

The political stakes were high enough that Texas House Speaker Joe Straus publicly suggested the state should "take a look" at the board's structure, potentially replacing elected members with appointed ones if they weren't "getting their job done."

In 2010, the board made international headlines when it revised history curriculum in ways critics said had "religious and racial overtones," including changes some characterized as removing a "left-leaning bias" from textbooks.

However, the board's textbook power has diminished somewhat since 2011. That year, new rules allowed local school districts to choose their own instructional materials even if they weren't on the state-approved list. Most districts initially continued following state recommendations out of habit, but the trend has slowly shifted toward more local choice.

The State Board of Education

The TEA doesn't operate independently. It's overseen by a fifteen-member State Board of Education, elected from single-member districts across Texas.

The election system is deliberately staggered, similar to how the United States Senate works. Board members serve four-year terms with no term limits. But here's where it gets complicated: every decade, following the census, all fifteen seats appear on the same ballot. After that election, members participate in a drawing to determine their future election cycles.

Half the members draw what's called a 2-4-4 cycle: they'll face voters again in just two years, then twice more at four-year intervals. The other half draw a 4-4-2 cycle: they get four years before their next election, then four more years, then just two years before the next census resets everything.

The result is that roughly half the board faces voters every two years, creating opportunities for gradual political shifts while preventing any single election from completely transforming the body.

The board's composition matters enormously. In 2010, moderate Republican Thomas Ratliff (son of former Lieutenant Governor Bill Ratliff) unseated Don McLeroy, the conservative bloc leader. Ratliff later said the board became "far different" in political character after that shift. But in 2022, Republicans captured an additional seat, bringing their total to ten of fifteen members. Many of the newer members ran on opposition to critical race theory and what they characterized as inappropriate gender identity lessons in schools.

The Education Service Centers

Given that Texas spans 268,596 square miles—larger than any European country except Russia—the TEA can't realistically manage everything from its Austin headquarters. So the state is divided into twenty regions, each served by an Education Service Center.

These regional centers act as intermediaries between the state agency and local schools. They help districts improve student performance, find operational efficiencies, and implement initiatives from the legislature or commissioner. Importantly, though, they have no regulatory authority. They can advise, assist, and support, but they can't issue orders or sanctions. That power remains with TEA headquarters.

The regional centers have an unusual funding structure. They're not political units with taxing authority—they can't levy taxes on residents. Instead, they survive on state and federal funding plus contracts with individual school districts and schools that pay for their services.

The Special Education Scandal

The TEA's most damaging controversy emerged in 2016, when the Houston Chronicle published a series of investigative reports revealing what amounted to systematic denial of special education services to thousands of Texas students.

The story was damning. Since at least 2004, state education officials had imposed an arbitrary benchmark: no more than 8.5% of students in any district should receive special education services. This wasn't based on any assessment of actual student needs. It was simply a number.

Districts that exceeded the benchmark faced pressure to cut their special education populations. And they did. By 2015, the rate of students receiving special education in Texas had fallen to exactly 8.5%—far below the national average of 13%.

How did districts achieve these numbers? The Chronicle documented disturbing practices. Some districts cut services for children with autism and dyslexia. Others refused to conduct eligibility evaluations in languages other than English, effectively excluding immigrant families. Some wouldn't accept medical records from other countries, meaning children with well-documented disabilities elsewhere had to start from scratch in Texas.

Students learning English faced particularly harsh treatment. The rate of English Language Learners receiving special education services was 20% lower than the rate for native English speakers—a gap that suggested language barriers were being confused with learning disabilities, or that non-English-speaking families couldn't navigate the system to get their children help.

In Houston, the state's largest district, officials went even further after meeting the 8.5% target. They lowered their internal standard to 8%. The district cut hundreds of special education positions, postponed diagnostic evaluations until second grade (meaning struggling kindergarteners and first-graders got no help), and created a list of disqualifying factors designed to keep students out of special education.

The scandal deepened in 2017 when the TEA awarded a $4.4 million contract to a Georgia-based company called SPEDx to analyze student records and help overhaul special education practices. The contract raised eyebrows: it was issued without competitive bidding, and advocates questioned the company's qualifications. A former TEA special education director filed a federal complaint alleging the agency violated state procurement rules.

In 2018, the United States Department of Education issued its verdict: Texas had violated federal law by failing to ensure students with disabilities were properly evaluated and provided with adequate public education. The state released a multi-year strategic plan but acknowledged in a grant application that it wouldn't be able to ensure adequate services for special education students until June 2020.

School Choice and the Education Freedom Accounts

In 2024, Texas entered the national debate over school choice in dramatic fashion.

The Texas Education Freedom Accounts program, set to launch in the 2026-2027 school year, will provide public funds to families who want alternatives to traditional public schools. Eligible families can use the money for private school tuition, homeschool expenses (provided they serve educational purposes), career-focused programs, and tutoring.

The program represents a fundamental shift in Texas education policy. For decades, the TEA's authority stopped at public school doors. Private schools, religious schools, and homeschools operated in a parallel universe, outside state oversight. Now public money will flow into that parallel universe—but with strings attached.

Private schools must meet specific criteria to participate. They need accreditation from the Texas Private School Accreditation or another agency authorized by the TEA, and they must have held that accreditation for at least two years. Schools that don't meet these standards won't be eligible, no matter how much families might want to use them.

The Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts—not the TEA—will oversee fund usage, ensuring families spend the money on legitimate educational expenses.

The Bible Curriculum Controversy

The most recent flashpoint came in 2024, when Texas became the largest state to approve Bible-based content for public elementary school curriculum.

The push began in June 2024, when Republican lawmakers and allies proposed that all elementary schools adopt curriculum with extensive biblical references. The proposal came with a financial incentive: an additional sixty dollars per student in funding for districts that implemented the new materials.

By November 2024, the State Board of Education voted to approve the new curriculum, allowing biblical references and "moral values" content in everyday teaching.

The implementation isn't mandatory. School districts can choose whether to adopt the materials. But the funding incentive creates pressure: districts that don't participate leave money on the table. And in a state where many communities strongly support religious education, local school boards may face constituent pressure to opt in.

Critics argue the curriculum violates the constitutional separation of church and state. Supporters counter that teaching about the Bible's influence on Western civilization and American history is legitimate, and that moral instruction has always been part of education.

The Texas Effect

Understanding the Texas Education Agency requires understanding something crucial: decisions made in Austin ripple outward.

Texas is the second most populous state in America, with nearly thirty million residents. Its public school system serves close to six million students. When Texas decides what should be in a textbook, publishers take notice. When Texas sets curriculum standards, other states often examine them as models—either to emulate or to deliberately avoid.

The TEA's power extends beyond classroom content. The state's approach to accountability—grading schools, threatening interventions, potentially taking over districts—has influenced education reform debates nationwide. Some see Texas as a model of tough standards and consequences. Others see it as a cautionary tale of high-stakes testing run amok, bureaucratic overreach, or ideological capture of public education.

The agency that began as a 1949 reform effort to clean up Texas's chaotic school district landscape has become something far more significant: a battleground where Americans fight over what children should learn, who should decide, and what role religion, politics, and ideology should play in public education.

That fight shows no signs of ending.

The Commissioner and the Future

Since January 2016, the Texas Education Agency has been led by Commissioner Mike Morath, a former member of the Dallas Independent School District's board of trustees appointed by Governor Greg Abbott.

The commissioner's role is substantial. Morath leads and manages the entire agency, coordinates between state and federal education authorities, and makes consequential decisions about district interventions—including the 2025 Fort Worth takeover that demonstrated just how willing the state is to override local control when it believes districts are failing.

Beneath the commissioner sits a hierarchy: a Chief Deputy Commissioner, Deputy Commissioners, associate commissioners, and agency staff. Together, they oversee an educational system that affects the lives of millions of Texas children and, through the state's outsize influence on textbooks and policy debates, countless more beyond Texas borders.

The agency that Claud Gilmer and A.M. Aikin, Jr. created to solve a teacher salary dispute has become something they likely never imagined: a front line in America's culture wars, a testing laboratory for education reform, and an institution with the power to shape what a generation learns about science, history, morality, and themselves.