08/21/2026
Last May, I authored legislation to require a full forensic audit of the Texas Education Agency. During Governor Abbott-appointed Commissioner Mike Morath’s tenure, we believed that staffing increases may have been as high as 50%. On Wednesday, we received the final audit.
It was much worse than we imagined.
In the past four years, wage costs for management grew by 64%, to $44.7 million, with an illegal ratio of one manager for every three and a half staff members (1:3.5), more than three times the number of managers the law allows.
These are serious revelations on their own, and there are more issues I haven’t covered, so I’d encourage you to read for yourself:
https://sao.texas.gov/Reports/Main/26-034.pdf
I sent the full report to my colleagues on the Government Efficiency Committee (DOGE) because there are several areas the audit failed to look into, including:
As of 2023, almost half, 43%, of the new charter schools approved by the Commissioner since 2016 had closed or never opened. Even worse, 65% received D or F TEA ratings. These are, frankly, terrible outcomes for our children. There continue to be serious concerns about TEA contracts, including 4,200 errors and hundreds of copyright violations that forced the TEA to spend $8.4 million to destroy and reprint copies of their new Bluebonnet curriculum materials. TEA’s new Bluebonnet curriculum is estimated to cost close to one billion dollars to implement across the state.
https://www.texastribune.org/2026/06/25/bluebonnet-learning-corrections-cost-texas-millions/
Every dollar spent on TEA over-management is a dollar that never reaches a classroom. The TEA has spent four years hiring managers for itself as neighborhood campuses close. It’s time for Abbott and Morath to focus on our children instead.
