In his second year teaching sixth-grade language arts at Rhodes Middle School in San Antonio, James Talarico, then 23, remembers getting a new student who came with a warning: Justin had been kicked out of his elementary school for bringing a knife to school and threatening, twice, to stab his fifth-grade teacher.
As he tells it today, Talarico welcomed the new student by shaking his hand and telling him he was glad to have him in class. Soon, 11-year-old Justin, who had a stormy home life, according to Talarico, started seeing a therapist provided by the school. Eventually, he joined a group of students who ate lunch in the classroom, and he began raising his hand to participate. That winter break, Justin brought Talarico a haphazardly wrapped gift: a cup decorated with snowflakes that he got at Dollar Tree.
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But in January, after school returned from the holidays, Talarico recalled hearing a commotion in the hallway. Justin was screaming, getting hauled out of the building by two football coaches. Justin had gotten into a fight in his third period class. His feet never touched the ground. Talarico never saw him again.
It was 2013, and the Texas Legislature, facing a budget crunch two years prior, had cut $5.4 billion in public school funding. Rhodes, a school in the San Antonio Independent School District and in one of Texas’ poorest zip codes, was underfunded and understaffed. Because of a budget shortfall, Talarico said, Justin’s therapist had been laid off.
Justin’s 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’s 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’ well-being both in and outside the classroom.
“We failed Justin,” Talarico said at a campaign event in Houston last month. “In 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.”
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.
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 — another star in the party seen as a strong communicator — 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.
But Talarico’s skeptics in the Legislature say he’s overstating the weight of his experience as an educator, given the short amount of time he spent in the classroom.
“I 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,” state Rep. Carl Tepper, R-Lubbock, said. “I appreciate the time he spent there. I’m 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’m not sure it really makes him an expert.”
If elected to the U.S. Senate, Talarico vowed to pursue universal childcare for 3- and 4-year-olds, arguing that 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.
“I think that James is haunted by both his inability and desire to do more,” said state Rep. Diego Bernal, a San Antonio Democrat who served with Talarico on the Texas House’s Public Education Committee. “That’s why he left the public schools — he felt like he couldn’t do enough for enough of them.”
Becoming a teacher
In his two years at Rhodes, according to interviews with nearly a dozen of his former students, friends and colleagues — all of whom said they planned to support his Senate run — Talarico became known as a teacher who inspired and earned the devotion of his students.
He built a classroom library to cultivate his students’ love for reading, worked one-on-one with sixth graders who needed extra support and showed up in the audience for his students’ extracurricular activities. Students who had behavioral issues at Rhodes stayed in line in Talarico’s classroom, because he commanded their respect and connected with them, said Edward Garcia, principal of Rhodes at the time.
But Talarico wasn’t immediately drawn to teaching upon graduating from the University of Texas in Austin in 2010, he said in an interview. He didn’t know what he wanted to do until he visited the classrooms of his friends who were teachers, Marcus Ceniceros and Zack Hall.
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.
“It only took him one second of stepping into my classroom to realize that kids aren’t getting a fair shake here,” Hall said.
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.
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.
“He had big aspirations, I think, for one day being of service to the state of Texas,” said Laura Saldivar Luna, then-executive director of Teach for America San Antonio, who interviewed Talarico for the program. Talarico, she added, was “deeply 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.”
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’s class, recalled thinking at the first staff meeting, “What is this white man doing in this school, in this neighborhood, on this side of town?”
Inside the classroom
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: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
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’s advice to reading, telling his students — many of whom were reading well below grade level — why he loved books and how they would read stories together that would stay with them forever. The “Big Goals” 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.
Growing up in San Antonio’s 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’ backpacks. In one of Talarico’s classes, students sat on the window AC unit because there weren’t enough seats. Talarico hated lunch duty, he said, in part because it “felt like being a prison guard.”
“The thing that makes kids misbehave — that’s a powerful thing, and it can be a positive thing if it’s channeled correctly,” said Talarico, who developed a soft spot for the troublemakers. “I also know that if it’s not channeled, if it’s not appreciated, it can quickly spiral into something much more destructive.”
One of the most striking challenges he faced was that some of his sixth graders didn’t 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.
“A 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,” Talarico said.
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 — iconic 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.
“Some of these kids have read a whole book their entire life, and now they love reading,” said Rickie Meredith, who taught eighth grade English at Rhodes. By the time Talarico’s students got to her class, she said, they were asking about the next books in The Hunger Games series.
A political path
But after two years in the classroom, Talarico was spent. Around half of Teach for America members leave their school after the end of their two-year commitment. There was no way he could continue teaching.
“It was just so hard,” he said, noting that teachers at schools like Rhodes simultaneously functioned as social workers and community organizers for their students. “I remember thinking, how do people do this for 20, 30 years — particularly in a high poverty, high-needs school?”
Still, he wanted to better understand the educational disparities he saw at Rhodes, which he took as evidence of a “deeply unequal and unjust” education system that lawmakers had allowed to persist.
“An education system that is built on property wealth is always going to be inherently unequal, and I saw it every day,” he said. “That kind of systematic underfunding is what led a kid who got to sixth grade to not be able to read.”
He went to the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he studied education policy for a year and worked for a local education nonprofit.
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.
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 “lens” he used to evaluate policy proposals.
In his first session, Talarico unveiled a “Whole Student Agenda,” 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.
“I quickly realized, if students aren’t healthy — mentally or physically — they can’t learn,” Talarico said. “That’s why I’ve worked so hard on some of the nonacademic parts of school.”
Just one of the package’s 24 bills became law his first term, though the Legislature also passed a school funding measure that expanded full day pre-kindergarten, increased teacher pay and invested $6.5 billion in public education that year.
Talarico’s 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, book bans and displaying the Ten Commandments in classrooms.
Today, Talarico touts education-related bills he led to passage in the Legislature, including the first cap on pre-K class sizes and a measure to place Narcan, medication to reverse fentanyl overdoses, on every school campus.
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.
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.
“James has sincerely held beliefs, but they’re also delusionally held beliefs,” Tepper, the Republican lawmaker from Lubbock, said. “His anecdotal stories are not the same — are very different from my experiences speaking with our children, educators and parents.”
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.
“It was a flawed education system trying to treat poverty,” Talarico said. “The heart of the problem was poverty, was an unjust economic system that hurt working people. And to me, the way we’re really going to deal with that is at the federal level.”
Which brings him to running for U.S. Senate, and the tagline of his campaign: That the biggest divide in the country isn’t left versus right, but top versus bottom.
“That is the primary fight,” he said, “and the best way I can help students like mine.”
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’s shuttering of the Department of Education and the movement within the GOP for a federal school voucher program.
“On 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’t in the classroom,” Talarico said at a campaign event in Houston last month. “It’s what I do in the halls of the state Legislature. It’s what I’m going to do in our nation’s capital.”