Justin\u2019s story, which Talarico recites often on the campaign trail, and his short two-year tenure as a teacher spurred his initial pursuit of public office, first in 2017 for the Texas House, and now, in 2026, for the U.S. Senate. The Austin Democrat\u2019s experience teaching undocumented, at-risk and overwhelmingly low-income students shaped his policy goals, driving his advocacy for more public school funding and measures to address students\u2019 well-being both in and outside the classroom.<\/p>\n
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State Rep. and U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico works with a student at Jeremiah Rhodes Middle School in San Antonio, where he taught between 2011-13. Courtesy of the Talarico campaign<\/p>\n
\u201cWe failed Justin,\u201d Talarico said at a campaign event in Houston last month. \u201cIn that moment, I promised myself that if I ever got a little bit of power, I would do everything I possibly could to stop something like that from happening ever again.\u201d<\/p>\n
School officials from the time confirmed layoffs took place that year and said they remembered Justin as a troubled and misunderstood student who developed a relationship with Talarico, but they could not confirm specific details Talarico described.<\/p>\n
It has been on education issues that Talarico has made a name for himself, rising in political prominence through his opposition to GOP proposals like private school vouchers and a mandate to display the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. As he competes in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate against U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Dallas \u2014\u00a0another star in the party seen as a strong communicator \u2014 Talarico is making this part of his biography central to his campaign, betting it will resonate with voters and set up a contrast with the eventual Republican nominee.<\/p>\n
But Talarico\u2019s skeptics in the Legislature say he\u2019s overstating the weight of his experience as an educator, given the short amount of time he spent in the classroom.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would never claim to be an expert in national security because of my six years in the Air Force, just as he should never claim to be an expert in education because of two years in the classroom,\u201d state Rep. Carl Tepper, R-Lubbock, said. \u201cI appreciate the time he spent there. I\u2019m sure he has a much broader perspective of the education system and how the school districts work than I do. But on the other hand, I\u2019m not sure it really makes him an expert.\u201d<\/p>\n
If elected to the U.S. Senate, Talarico vowed to pursue universal childcare for 3- and 4-year-olds, arguing that<\/a> that would free parents up to participate in the workforce while helping reduce educational disparities. He also wants to create a paid family leave plan, boost programs that support teacher hiring and training, expand the National School Lunch and School Breakfast programs and establish recommended guidelines for artificial intelligence in the classroom.<\/p>\n \u201cI think that James is haunted by both his inability and desire to do more,\u201d said state Rep. Diego Bernal, a San Antonio Democrat who served with Talarico on the Texas House\u2019s Public Education Committee. \u201cThat\u2019s why he left the public schools \u2014 he felt like he couldn\u2019t do enough for enough of them.\u201d<\/p>\n Becoming a teacher<\/p>\n In his two years at Rhodes, according to interviews with nearly a dozen of his former students, friends and colleagues \u2014 all of whom said they planned to support his Senate run \u2014 Talarico became known as a teacher who inspired and earned the devotion of his students.<\/p>\n He built a classroom library to cultivate his students\u2019 love for reading, worked one-on-one with sixth graders who needed extra support and showed up in the audience for his students\u2019 extracurricular activities. Students who had behavioral issues at Rhodes stayed in line in Talarico\u2019s classroom, because he commanded their respect and connected with them, said Edward Garcia, principal of Rhodes at the time.<\/p>\n The \u201creading zone,\u201d Talarico\u2019s in-class library at Rhodes Middle School. Courtesy of the Talarico campaign<\/p>\n But Talarico wasn\u2019t immediately drawn to teaching upon graduating from the University of Texas in Austin in 2010, he said in an interview. He didn\u2019t know what he wanted to do until he visited the classrooms of his friends who were teachers, Marcus Ceniceros and Zack Hall.<\/p>\n Ceniceros had him do story time and build gingerbread men with his first-graders in Houston. Hall had Talarico read to his third-graders in Dallas. <\/p>\n \u201cIt only took him one second of stepping into my classroom to realize that kids aren\u2019t getting a fair shake here,\u201d Hall said. <\/p>\n Hall and Ceniceros were both teaching through Teach for America, a national education nonprofit that recruits and trains people who commit to teaching for at least two years in high-needs schools around the country. <\/p>\n Remembering the influence his teachers had on him, Talarico decided, if nothing else, Teach for America would offer a meaningful chance for him to make an impact. As part of his application, Talarico, a government major hoping to instruct social studies, taught a five-minute sample lesson on the three branches of U.S. government. He brought a stool to illustrate how if one leg is removed, the stool would topple over. <\/p>\n \u201cHe had big aspirations, I think, for one day being of service to the state of Texas,\u201d said Laura Saldivar Luna, then-executive director of Teach for America San Antonio, who interviewed Talarico for the program. Talarico, she added, was \u201cdeeply steeped and aware of policy and history and all those types of things, and so he infused all of that as he was teaching his students.\u201d<\/p>\n Faculty members and administrators were surprised when Talarico, one of few non-Hispanic teachers at Rhodes, showed up on the first day in a blazer and cowboy boots, which remains his campaign trail uniform. Blanca Martinez, who helped teach special education students at Rhodes and whose son was in Talarico\u2019s class, recalled thinking at the first staff meeting, \u201cWhat is this white man doing in this school, in this neighborhood, on this side of town?\u201d<\/p>\n Inside the classroom<\/p>\n On the first day of school, Talarico woke up to a text from his mom with a quote that would guide his next two years in the classroom: \u201cIf you want to build a ship, don\u2019t drum up people to collect wood and don\u2019t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.\u201d<\/p>\n \n His students remembered him lining them up to shake their hands on the first day, and making it a point to set expectations and create a collaborative, cozy environment. He applied his mother\u2019s advice to reading, telling his students \u2014\u00a0many of whom were reading well below grade level \u2014 why he loved books and how they would read stories together that would stay with them forever. The \u201cBig Goals\u201d he set for his students, as declared on a poster above the library he built, were to advance two years in reading level, and read 40 books by the end of the year. <\/p>\n Growing up in San Antonio\u2019s West Side, a predominantly low-income and Hispanic neighborhood, many Rhodes students had seen violence and had parents in the criminal justice system. Law enforcement officers and police dogs were a regular presence on campus, checking classrooms and students\u2019 backpacks. In one of Talarico\u2019s classes, students sat on the window AC unit because there weren\u2019t enough seats. Talarico hated lunch duty, he said, in part because it \u201cfelt like being a prison guard.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe thing that makes kids misbehave \u2014 that\u2019s a powerful thing, and it can be a positive thing if it\u2019s channeled correctly,\u201d said Talarico, who developed a soft spot for the troublemakers. \u201cI also know that if it\u2019s not channeled, if it\u2019s not appreciated, it can quickly spiral into something much more destructive.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the most striking challenges he faced was that some of his sixth graders didn\u2019t know how to read and were scared to confront it. Talarico had one of those students come into school early so they could read The Boxcar Children together until the student slowly fell in love with the series. Other sixth graders built confidence by starting with graphic novels or books based on superhero movies.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of what I was trying to do was trying to help them fall in love with reading, even when they had already had a bad experience,\u201d Talarico said.<\/p>\n He structured his classroom to help foster that. Instead of individual desks, Talarico set up round tables to encourage his students to discuss their readings with each other, and he later got rid of his own desk to make more space. He lined the walls with posters of figures like Jay-Z, Lebron James, Sonia Sotomayor and Maya Angelou \u2014\u00a0iconic figures his students could recognize and take inspiration from. He brought in a couch and bean bags to make a reading nook. Students who finished reading The Hunger Games that first year got to go see the movie in theaters. <\/p>\n Talarico\u2019s classroom at Rhodes Middle School in San Antonio featured round tables instead of desks and an in-class library. Courtesy of the Talarico campaign<\/p>\n \u201cSome of these kids have read a whole book their entire life, and now they love reading,\u201d said Rickie Meredith, who taught eighth grade English at Rhodes. By the time Talarico\u2019s students got to her class, she said, they were asking about the next books in The Hunger Games series.<\/p>\n A political path<\/p>\n But after two years in the classroom, Talarico was spent. Around half of Teach for America <\/a>members leave their school after the end of their two-year commitment. There was no way he could continue teaching.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was just so hard,\u201d he said, noting that teachers at schools like Rhodes simultaneously functioned as social workers and community organizers for their students. \u201cI remember thinking, how do people do this for 20, 30 years \u2014 particularly in a high poverty, high-needs school?\u201d<\/p>\n Still, he wanted to better understand the educational disparities he saw at Rhodes, which he took as evidence of a \u201cdeeply unequal and unjust\u201d education system that lawmakers had allowed to persist.<\/p>\n \u201cAn education system that is built on property wealth is always going to be inherently unequal, and I saw it every day,\u201d he said. \u201cThat kind of systematic underfunding is what led a kid who got to sixth grade to not be able to read.\u201d<\/p>\n He went to the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he studied education policy for a year and worked for a local education nonprofit.<\/p>\n Then, when Larry Gonzales, the Republican state representative in his home district, stepped down in 2017, Talarico decided to run. He flipped the district blue and became the youngest member of the Texas House in 2018.<\/p>\n Throughout his four terms in the Texas House, education became his marquee issue, with his former students, and how they might be impacted, serving as the \u201clens\u201d he used to evaluate policy proposals.<\/p>\n In his first session, Talarico unveiled a \u201cWhole Student Agenda<\/a>,\u201d a bipartisan legislative package to expand mental health services on campuses, scale up suicide prevention programs in K-12 schools and invest in financial literacy, civics and sex education curriculum. <\/p>\n \u201cI quickly realized, if students aren\u2019t healthy \u2014 mentally or physically \u2014 they can\u2019t learn,\u201d Talarico said. \u201cThat\u2019s why I\u2019ve worked so hard on some of the nonacademic parts of school.\u201d<\/p>\n Just one<\/a> of the package\u2019s 24 bills became law his first term, though the Legislature also passed a school funding measure<\/a> that expanded full day pre-kindergarten, increased teacher pay and invested $6.5 billion in public education that year.<\/p>\n Talarico\u2019s focus on education issues also drove his political rise. In recent years, he frequently went viral on social media for clips of him fighting his Republican colleagues on proposals such as school vouchers<\/a>, book bans<\/a> and displaying the Ten Commandments<\/a> in classrooms.<\/p>\n Today, Talarico touts education-related bills he led to passage in the Legislature, including the first cap on pre-K class sizes<\/a> and a measure to place Narcan<\/a>, medication to reverse fentanyl overdoses, on every school campus.<\/p>\n But his legislative impact in the Republican-dominated Legislature ultimately has been limited. Though he was the lead author of nearly 200 bills introduced over four terms, only 16 of those bills have become law. Eight of the 16 passed relate to education, childcare or workforce development for young people.<\/p>\n Talarico speaks at a House Democratic press conference opposing private school vouchers on Oct. 9, 2023 in Austin, prior to the start of the 3rd special session of the 88th Legislature. A voucher bill was eventually approved during the 2025 legislative session. Bob Daemmrich for the Texas Tribune<\/p>\n In addition, school funding has not kept pace with inflation, and Republicans pushed through the school voucher program, the Ten Commandments bill, legislation restricting the books children can access and other measures opposed by Democrats. <\/p>\n \u201cJames has sincerely held beliefs, but they\u2019re also delusionally held beliefs,\u201d Tepper, the Republican lawmaker from Lubbock, said. \u201cHis anecdotal stories are not the same \u2014 are very different from my experiences speaking with our children, educators and parents.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, the longer he served in the Texas House, Talarico said, the more fixated he became on what he saw as the root cause of the challenges at Rhodes: a broken economic system. <\/p>\n \u201cIt was a flawed education system trying to treat poverty,\u201d Talarico said. \u201cThe heart of the problem was poverty, was an unjust economic system that hurt working people. And to me, the way we\u2019re really going to deal with that is at the federal level.\u201d<\/p>\n Which brings him to running for U.S. Senate, and the tagline of his campaign: That the biggest divide in the country isn\u2019t left versus right, but top versus bottom.<\/p>\n \u201cThat is the primary fight,\u201d he said, \u201cand the best way I can help students like mine.\u201d<\/p>\n Most education policy is determined on the state and local level. But in addition to his economic populism, Talarico sees his fight for public schools going national, citing the Trump administration\u2019s shuttering of the Department of Education and the movement within the GOP for a federal school voucher program.<\/p>\n \u201cOn my last day as a classroom teacher, I told my students that I would fight for them every single day of my life, even if I wasn\u2019t in the classroom,\u201d Talarico said at a campaign event in Houston last month. \u201cIt\u2019s what I do in the halls of the state Legislature. It\u2019s what I\u2019m going to do in our nation\u2019s capital.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/1768564209_31_Talarico-Teaching-03.jpg\")
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Then-teacher Talarico speaks with a student at Rhodes Middle School, where he taught between 2011-13. Courtesy of the Talarico campaign\n<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/1768564209_43_Talarico-Teaching-02.jpg\")
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