35 Vital Texas Public Education Thought Leaders

Introduction

Texas public education is not a local story. With more than 5.5 million students enrolled in over 1,200 school districts and charter networks, Texas educates one in every ten public school students in the United States. What happens inside Texas classrooms, what gets decided in the Texas Legislature, and what the Texas Education Agency enforces ripples outward in ways that shape national policy conversations, teacher supply chains, and the long-term economic trajectory of the entire South. If you care about public education anywhere, you have reason to pay attention to what is happening in Texas right now.

The state is navigating several of the most contested questions in modern public education at the same time. Texas launched one of the largest school voucher programs in the nation in 2025, directing an initial billion dollars toward private school and homeschool costs with the 2026-27 school year as its launch point. Meanwhile, Texas public schools saw their first non-pandemic enrollment decline in nearly four decades in 2025-26, with Latino students accounting for the overwhelming majority of the drop. Teacher shortages remain acute, with uncertified teachers accounting for more than half of newly hired instructors in recent years. And landmark funding legislation, House Bill 2 in 2025, injected $8.5 billion into public education, including $3.5 billion directed to teacher salaries.

These are not abstract policy disputes. They are live, high-stakes decisions being made right now, and the people on this list are at the centre of them. They include superintendents leading high-growth districts through extraordinary pressure, researchers publishing the evidence that drives policy, advocates who show up to the Texas Capitol to testify when it matters, and classroom-level practitioners whose thinking is reshaping how schools work. What they share is a genuine, active contribution to the conversation about what public education in Texas can and should be.

The 35 voices assembled here were selected for the depth and currency of their contribution to Texas public education. This list deliberately moves past the national household names everyone has already heard of, in favour of the people who are doing the work in Texas communities, publishing the research that matters to Texas school leaders, and building the organisations that make it possible for public schools to improve. You will find superintendents from Rosenberg, Odessa, Georgetown, and the Texas-Mexico border alongside researchers from UT Austin, policy advocates from San Antonio, and community leaders from Fort Worth.

If your school, district, or organisation wants to understand how to navigate the leadership challenges Texas schools are facing right now, Jonno White works with school leadership teams to build the culture, communication, and team dynamics that make change sustainable. To discuss how Jonno might support your team, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why This Matters

The stakes of Texas public education cannot be overstated. More than 60 percent of Texas public school students come from low-income families. The state's 1.1 million emergent bilingual students represent one of the most significant and underserved populations in any school system in the world. At the same time, Texas has used its size and political will to become a laboratory for some of the most ambitious education reforms in the country, including the Teacher Incentive Allotment, a programme that has put more than 25,000 teachers on pathways to six-figure salaries, and a state accountability system that has driven measurable academic gains in previously struggling districts.

The conversations being led by the people on this list are not just important for Texas. They are shaping the national debate about what public schools owe their students, how state governments should hold districts accountable, whether public money should follow students to private institutions, and what it means to lead a school when the political environment is genuinely hostile to the institution you are running. Following these voices is one of the most direct ways to stay informed about where public education in America is headed.

For school leaders who want to translate the ideas of these thinkers into practical team and culture decisions, Jonno White delivers keynotes and working sessions that help leadership teams move from ideas to action. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to explore what that looks like for your organisation.

How This List Was Compiled

Every person on this list was assessed against a consistent set of standards. The first was genuine, current contribution to the field of Texas public education, whether through published research, policy advocacy, district leadership, classroom practice, or community organising. The second was active engagement with the ideas that matter most to Texas public schools right now, including school funding, teacher workforce, accountability, equity, and the ongoing voucher debate. The third was geographic and disciplinary diversity, ensuring the list represents voices from across the state and from research, practice, policy, advocacy, and community leadership.

The list includes voices from Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio, Odessa, Georgetown, Tomball, Corsicana, Gainesville, Pflugerville, and the Texas-Mexico border. It spans university researchers, superintendents of both large urban systems and mid-sized regional districts, policy advocates, national keynote speakers with deep Texas connections, and community leaders whose work happens below the waterline of national media coverage. We deliberately moved past the well-known national names the reader has probably already encountered in order to surface the practitioners and researchers who are doing the specific, difficult work of improving Texas public schools.

Category 1: Superintendents Who Are Changing the Conversation

District leaders in Texas operate at the intersection of every force shaping public education right now. They manage the legislative changes, the funding uncertainties, the teacher shortages, and the expectations of communities that are growing, shrinking, or deeply divided about what public school should be. The seven superintendents in this category are not simply managing their districts. They are actively contributing to the field through writing, speaking, advocacy, and the visible example of their leadership.

1. Dr. Roosevelt Nivens

Lamar Consolidated ISD

The 2026 AASA National Superintendent of the Year is not a title awarded to administrators who manage their districts competently. It goes to leaders who reshape what everyone else thinks is possible. Roosevelt Nivens assumed leadership of Lamar Consolidated ISD in Rosenberg, Texas in 2021 and has since guided a district of 49,000 students through one of the fastest growth trajectories in the state, passing a $1.5 billion bond and opening 15 new schools in five years. His approach is built around the conviction that culture matters more than strategy, a philosophy he first heard from former US Secretary of Education Rod Paige and has never stopped practising.

In a field where Black leadership remains underrepresented at the highest levels, Nivens has become a nationally significant figure whose specific accomplishments in Texas carry weight far beyond the Rosenberg community. His book Thrive Through the Five, published by Dave Burgess Consulting, was a finalist in the 2022 International Book Awards for Nonfiction, reflecting a thought leadership presence that extends well beyond the superintendent's chair.

2. Dr. LaTonya Goffney

Aldine ISD

Every first in her career is the same kind of first: Dr. LaTonya Goffney was the first African American to serve as superintendent in Coldspring-Oakhurst CISD, the first in Lufkin ISD, and the first in Aldine ISD, one of the largest school districts in Texas with nearly 70,000 students in North Houston. She has increased student achievement in every district she has served, and in April 2025 was voted the 2025-26 President-Elect of AASA, The School Superintendents Association, the nation's primary organisation for school system leaders. She is also the first African American woman to have served as president of the Texas Association of School Administrators.

Her influence on Texas public education is both structural and human. The Aldine HEAL school, launched in partnership with Memorial Hermann Hospital and funded by a $250 million Bloomberg Philanthropies grant, gives students a direct pipeline into healthcare careers. Goffney's LinkedIn presence is active, frequent, and generous, regularly featuring the achievements of students, teachers, and campus leaders across the Aldine community.

3. Dr. Quintin Shepherd

Pflugerville ISD

The phrase radical transparency is used frequently enough in education circles to have become almost meaningless. Quintin Shepherd has spent nearly three decades as a superintendent in three states actually practising it, and the difference is visible in everything from his public writing to the way he describes the pressures facing school leaders. Shepherd joined Pflugerville ISD in 2024 and quickly became one of the most active superintendent voices in the state, writing regularly for TASA INSIGHT, speaking at national conferences including FETC in January 2026, and contributing to a widely circulated March 2026 leadership publication about how trust in public education is built through honest conversation rather than managed messaging.

His book The Secret to Transformational Leadership, co-authored with Sarah Williamson, and his second book Transforming Education for Systemic Change and Empowered Communities (2024), reflect a sustained intellectual engagement with the question of what compassionate, vulnerable leadership actually looks like in a complex public institution. He currently serves on the National Superintendent's Association Governing Board, representing Texas.

4. Dr. Martha Salazar-Zamora

Tomball ISD

When the Texas Association of School Administrators honoured Dr. Martha Salazar-Zamora with its Golden Deeds for Education Award in January 2026, the citation pointed to more than her results at Tomball ISD, though those results are striking. Tomball is the only A-rated school district in both Harris and Montgomery counties and has been named the top school district in Harris County for seven consecutive years. The deeper recognition was for a career that has made the next generation of Texas school leaders better. In the 2025-26 school year alone, Salazar-Zamora mentored 18 new superintendents, a contribution to the Texas education leadership pipeline that will reverberate for decades.

She was named Texas Superintendent of the Year in 2023 and was a finalist for the AASA National Superintendent of the Year Award in 2024. A fluent advocate for equitable school funding, she has consistently used her statewide platforms to argue that funding students adequately is not a political issue but a basic requirement of a functioning democracy.

5. Dr. Scott Muri

Ector County ISD

West Texas does not generate much national education coverage. The students in Odessa's Ector County ISD, where more than 80 percent come from economically disadvantaged families, do not appear on the most prominent conference stages or in the most-cited research papers. Dr. Scott Muri has spent his career choosing to work precisely where the headlines are thinnest and the need is greatest. A nationally recognised turnaround superintendent, Muri joined Ector County ISD in 2018 and has systematically improved both academic outcomes and organisational culture in a district that serves communities defined by oil industry volatility. His public writing and speaking draw on that experience to argue that the gap between high-performing and underperforming districts is almost never about the students and almost always about the quality of leadership, systems, and culture.

Muri is a contributor to national conversations about school turnaround and serves as a regular speaker at education leadership conferences, bringing a West Texas practitioner lens that is largely absent from the dominant voices in the field.

6. Dr. Holly Ferguson

Prosper ISD

Holly Ferguson has spent her entire career in Prosper ISD, rising from elementary school teacher in 1998 to superintendent in 2020, and that institutional continuity has given her a distinctive perspective on what it means to build a school culture that lasts. Prosper ISD is one of the fastest-growing districts in Texas, growing to more than 32,000 students by the 2025-26 school year, and Ferguson has managed that growth while maintaining a culture that multiple community surveys describe as unusually strong. She serves on the National Hope Squad Board, a commitment to mental health awareness and suicide prevention in schools that reflects her view of what it means to lead a whole child.

Her writing for TASA INSIGHT in early 2024 on the relationship between leadership teams and governance offers a practitioner's view of board-superintendent dynamics that is both honest and practically useful to school leaders navigating similar terrain.

7. Dr. John Craft

Northside ISD

San Antonio's Northside ISD serves nearly 100,000 students, making it one of the largest school districts in Texas. Dr. John Craft has led the district through a period of significant funding pressure while maintaining a clear focus on what public school should prioritise when choices are difficult. His 2024 statement to the Northside board, in which he argued that the anti-voucher position was no longer sustainable as a first priority and that securing adequate public funding mattered more, attracted national attention and reflected the kind of honest, uncomfortable thinking that the best public school leaders do when the stakes are real. Craft is active within TASA and contributes to the statewide conversation about how urban districts can stay focused on student outcomes while managing the political pressures that now surround public schools.

Category 2: Researchers Building the Evidence Base

The research that shapes Texas public education policy does not all come from Washington or New York. Some of the most consequential work on school leadership, equity, bilingual education, and the impact of state intervention is being done by researchers embedded in Texas institutions, who understand the specific legal, demographic, and political context that makes Texas schools unlike any other system in the world.

8. Dr. David DeMatthews

University of Texas at Austin

David DeMatthews holds the W.K. Kellogg Endowed Professorship in Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin and is the founder of the Texas Education Leadership Lab, which conducts rigorous, timely research on the issues Texas school leaders are actually dealing with right now. His work spans special education leadership, school finance, voucher policy, and the impact of state takeovers on historically marginalised communities. He regularly provides expert commentary for The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, and the Houston Chronicle, and his op-ed output in Texas media is among the most consistent of any education researcher in the state.

In 2025, Education Week ranked him 36th among the nation's top education scholars and sixth in Curriculum, Instruction, and Administration. His April 2026 keynote at the Rice University research symposium on the logic of state takeover in Houston ISD reflects a researcher who maintains genuine engagement with the practitioner world even as his academic output continues to grow.

9. Dr. Angela Valenzuela

University of Texas at Austin

Angela Valenzuela has been one of the most important voices in Texas education equity for more than two decades, and her work has only become more urgent as the policy environment has intensified. Her 1999 book Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring remains one of the most cited works in the sociology of education and provides a theoretical foundation that Texas educators working with Latino students return to constantly. Her blog, Educational Equity, Politics, and Policy in Texas, has been a consistent source of analysis on the state's accountability system, bilingual education policy, and the legislative battles that shape public school funding.

As director of the Texas Center for Education Policy at UT Austin, she directs the National Latino Education Research and Policy Project and the Academia Cuauhtli Saturday school programme in Austin, which provides bilingual, culturally sustaining education to Title I fourth-grade students. Her work connects scholarship, advocacy, and community practice in ways that most researchers in her field do not attempt.

10. Dr. Susan Kemper Patrick

Learning Policy Institute

Susan Kemper Patrick is a senior researcher at the Learning Policy Institute whose work focuses specifically on Texas educator workforce issues, particularly the conditions that attract, develop, and retain teachers in high-need districts. Her research on teacher supply and the implications of House Bill 2 was cited in a widely watched April 2026 Houston Endowment panel on the Texas teacher workforce, and her analysis provides some of the most rigorous available evidence on why teacher shortages in Texas are structural rather than cyclical.

Her focus on the Texas context distinguishes her from most Learning Policy Institute researchers, whose work tends toward national generalisations, and gives her analysis a specificity that Texas district leaders and policymakers find directly applicable.

11. Dr. Darlene Breaux

Harris County Dept of Education

As Director of the Research and Evaluation Institute at the Harris County Department of Education, Darlene Breaux occupies a unique position in Texas public education: she conducts applied research that is designed from the start to be used by school leaders in the field, not published in academic journals and then forgotten. Her work on assessment and accountability has been influential in shaping how the state's Measure What Matters council, convened by Raise Your Hand Texas, thinks about what school success should actually look like beyond standardised test scores. She brings a practitioner-researcher lens that is relatively rare in a field where those two orientations often talk past each other.

12. Dr. Gholdy Muhammad

Georgia State University

Gholdy Muhammad is the author of Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy and a nationally prominent voice on culturally responsive and historically grounded education. She was selected as one of the keynote speakers for TASSP's 2026 annual conference, reflecting Texas school leaders' recognition that the deficit-based models that have long dominated schooling in high-minority communities are not producing the outcomes students deserve. Her five-pursuit framework, which asks educators to centre identity, skills, intellect, criticality, and joy, offers a coherent alternative that a growing number of Texas teachers and principals are actively implementing.

Her research on Black literary societies in the nineteenth century, documented in Cultivating Genius and developed further in her 2023 book Unearthing Joy, provides historical grounding for her contemporary prescriptions that makes her arguments genuinely difficult to dismiss. She is an Associate Professor of Language and Literacy at Georgia State University.

Category 3: Policy Advocates and Equity Champions

Texas public education policy is not made by bureaucrats working in isolation. It is shaped by advocates who show up to the Capitol, by researchers who translate evidence into legislative language, and by community leaders who insist that the students most often overlooked by the system be kept visible in every policy conversation. The voices in this category represent the full range of advocacy work that makes public education policy better.

13. Dr. Chloe Latham Sikes

IDRA (Intercultural Development Research Association)

IDRA has been the most consistent institutional voice for educational equity in Texas for more than 50 years. As Deputy Director of Policy, Chloe Latham Sikes carries much of that voice into the legislative arena. In 2025 alone she testified before multiple Texas House and Senate committees on voucher programmes, school funding, DEI restrictions, and student discipline reform. Her research briefs on how Texas schools are funded, and what that means for equity, are among the most useful plain-language explanations of an extraordinarily complex system that exist anywhere.

Her 2025 community-based study on the impact of Texas Senate Bill 17's ban on college DEI offices, published in March 2025, represents the kind of applied, justice-oriented research that has always been IDRA's signature. Her testimony is technically rigorous and personally courageous in a political environment where that combination is genuinely uncommon.

14. Lizdelia Pinon

IDRA

Few education challenges in Texas are as structurally neglected as bilingual education. Texas has more than 1.1 million emergent bilingual students, 92 percent of whom speak Spanish, and yet the state has one bilingual-certified teacher for every 48 students who need them. Lizdelia Pinon has spent her career at IDRA making the case for what it would actually take to change that ratio and why doing so is an equity imperative, not a technical inconvenience. Her 2024 policy brief The Path to a Stronger State Seal of Biliteracy, co-authored with Chloe Latham Sikes, offers a concrete roadmap for making bilingual achievement visible, valued, and rewarded in Texas schools.

Her advocacy connects classroom practice to legislative outcomes in a way that requires both deep knowledge of the research and genuine relationships with the policymakers who need to act on it. Both are evident in her public work.

15. Dr. Paige Duggins-Clay

IDRA

School discipline reform is one of the most consequential and under-covered areas of Texas public education policy. Research consistently shows that zero-tolerance discipline policies disproportionately harm Black and Latino students, pushing them out of classrooms and into what researchers call the school-to-prison pipeline. Paige Duggins-Clay is the most active legal and policy voice at IDRA on this question, having submitted testimony and written extensively on House Bill 6 in 2025, which she argued would make it easier to push students out rather than provide the support they need. Her legal expertise and her commitment to centering student voice in policy debates distinguishes her work from most education policy advocacy.

16. Dr. Theresa Trevino

Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment

The Texas accountability system has been one of the most contentious arenas in the state's education policy debates for two decades. Dr. Theresa Trevino has been one of the most persistent and principled advocates for making that system actually serve students rather than simply rank schools. Through Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment, she has pushed consistently for an accountability framework that goes beyond standardised test scores to include graduation rates, learning growth, and measures of whole-child development. Her work on the Raise Your Hand Texas Measure What Matters Council on Assessment and Accountability has helped shape the legislative proposals that have drawn the most serious engagement from both parties.

17. Kyev Tatum

North Texas Community Leader

The debate over school vouchers in Texas has been conducted almost entirely among lobbyists, legislators, and education organisations. Kyev Tatum is one of the most visible community voices who has brought a different constituency into that conversation. As a minister and community leader in the Fort Worth area, he has argued publicly and with genuine theological and civic conviction that redirecting public funds from public schools, which are the primary institution in many low-income Black and Latino communities, represents a form of structural harm that the policy debate consistently underestimates. His voice represents a form of advocacy that is not well-captured by the usual categories of education policy and adds essential texture to this list.

18. Jennifer Lee

Texas Education Advocate

The voucher debate in Texas has produced genuinely contested questions about what school choice means for Black families specifically, and Jennifer Lee is one of the advocates who has made that question visible in the national conversation. Her perspective, profiled in detail in the Texas Tribune in April 2026, is that the historical argument against vouchers, rooted in their use as a segregationist tool in the 1950s, does not automatically override the contemporary argument that Black families in underperforming districts deserve more options. The tension she represents is real, and her presence on this list reflects the belief that thought leadership on Texas public education requires engaging the full complexity of the policy debate, not just the consensus positions.

Category 4: Association and Organisational Leaders

The organisations that support and advocate for Texas public schools are not neutral conveners. They take positions, build coalitions, and deploy resources in ways that shape what is possible in the legislative arena and in the day-to-day work of district and campus leaders. The voices in this category lead some of the most influential of those organisations.

19. Kevin Brown

Texas Association of School Administrators

The executive director of TASA has one of the most difficult jobs in Texas public education: representing the interests of superintendents across a state where public school leadership operates under enormous pressure, in a political environment that has at various points been actively hostile to the institutions those leaders run. Kevin Brown has led TASA through the most contested legislative period in recent memory, including the 2025 session that produced both the $8.5 billion public education funding package and the $1 billion voucher programme. His public communication on what TASA's priorities are and why, including an October 2025 statement that funding is the top priority rather than opposing vouchers as an absolute position, reflects honest strategic thinking that not all advocacy leaders are willing to do publicly.

20. Anne Wicks

George W. Bush Institute

As the Don Evans Family Managing Director of Opportunity and Democracy at the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas, Anne Wicks leads one of the most influential nonpartisan education policy voices in Texas. Her testimony before the US Senate's Subcommittee on Education in July 2025, focused on the Science of Reading and the importance of maintaining rigorous state assessment systems, drew on Texas as a national model for what happens when policy, data, and incentive systems align. Her monthly education newsletter, which she writes consistently, has built a following among policymakers, district leaders, and education researchers who want rigorous, evidence-based analysis that is not locked behind partisan framing.

She moderated a panel at the 2026 ASU-GSV Summit bringing together Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles, Commit Partnership CEO Todd Williams, and Ballmer Group's Jeff Edmundson, making the case that Texas's combination of accountability, philanthropic investment, and place-based partnerships represents a model worth studying.

21. Todd Williams

Commit Partnership

The Commit Partnership in Dallas is the largest educational collective impact organisation in the United States, bringing together more than 200 institutions, including 15 school districts and eight higher-education institutions serving more than 700,000 students. Its founding chairman and CEO Todd Williams has been building this organisation since 2011, and the results are visible in Dallas County, where the proportion of young adults earning a living wage has risen from 22 percent to 33 percent since the partnership began its systematic work on education outcomes. Williams also served as Education Policy Advisor to former Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, and his appointment by Governor Abbott to the 2018 Texas Commission on Public School Finance, where he chaired the Outcomes Committee, put him at the centre of the legislative process that produced HB 3 and its $11.5 billion investment in public schools.

His most valuable contribution to the Texas public education conversation is his ability to connect policy change at the state level with the ground-level data showing whether that change is actually improving outcomes.

22. Dr. DesMontes Stewart

Gainesville ISD

DesMontes Stewart was elected in May 2026 to serve as one of three Texas representatives on the AASA Governing Board, replacing Walter Jackson of La Porte ISD and beginning his term in July 2026. His leadership of Gainesville ISD, a rural district in North Texas, and his elevation to a national governance role, reflects both the strength of his thinking about public school leadership and the importance of rural Texas voices in national education conversations. Rural districts face pressures that urban and suburban systems rarely encounter, including dramatic swings in local revenue from industrial activity, limited access to the talent pipelines that larger districts can draw from, and community demographics that are changing faster than the institutions built to serve them. Stewart represents and articulates that experience at a level that makes him genuinely useful to anyone trying to understand the full picture of Texas public education.

23. Dr. Chris Moran

Leander ISD

As one of the four TASA officers for 2025-26, Dr. Chris Moran represents the leadership voices that are shaping the direction of Texas's primary superintendent organisation during one of its most consequential years. Leander ISD has navigated the pressures of fast growth in the Austin area while maintaining a focus on student outcomes that has attracted national attention. Moran's contributions to TASA's public positions on school funding, teacher development, and accountability reflect the kind of thoughtful, evidence-grounded district leadership that is easy to overlook when national coverage focuses on the most dramatic flashpoints.

Category 5: Speakers, Authors, and Classroom-Level Voices

The ideas that change how schools actually work rarely travel from policy papers directly to practice. They travel through the voices of people who can make complex research accessible, who can speak to the daily experience of teachers and principals in ways that academic language cannot, and who model in their own careers the kind of practice they are advocating for. The voices in this category serve that function for Texas and national audiences.

24. Jonathan Alsheimer

Author and Principal Leadership Consultant

Jonathan Alsheimer is a Texas high school principal and author whose work on student engagement, classroom culture, and the dynamics of adolescent disengagement has built a following among teachers and principals that extends well beyond his campus. His 2022 book Next Level Teaching and his continuing output on social media and the conference circuit have made him one of the most recognisable practitioner voices in Texas K-12 education. His selection as a keynote speaker for TASSP's 2026 conference reflects both his accessibility and the genuine substance of his message: that the relational quality of teaching is not soft or supplementary but central to academic outcomes. His voice on this list represents the classroom-level perspective that research and policy conversations often miss entirely.

25. Liz Dozier

Chicago Beyond

Liz Dozier is the founder and CEO of Chicago Beyond, an organisation that funds and supports community-based youth initiatives with a model built around genuine community partnership rather than top-down programme delivery. Her selection as a TASSP keynote speaker for 2026 reflects Texas school leaders' recognition that the equity work that matters most happens at the intersection of schools and the communities they serve. Her career, including her work turning around Chicago's Fenger High School, was featured in Paul Tough's New York Times bestselling book How Children Succeed, and her story was the subject of CNN's eight-episode documentary series Chicagoland.

Her framework for what it means to truly partner with communities rather than serve them offers Texas school leaders a practically useful reframe for how they think about the relationship between their institutions and the families they are there to support.

26. Dr. Gholdy Muhammad

Georgia State University

Already introduced in Category 2 as a researcher, Muhammad's presence as a TASSP keynote speaker for 2026 reflects her significance as both an academic and a practitioner voice. Her five-pursuit equity framework has been adopted by a growing number of Texas schools as an organising principle for curriculum design and classroom practice. Her research on the Black literary societies of the nineteenth century, documented in Cultivating Genius, provides historical grounding for her argument that Black students have always been capable of the highest levels of academic and intellectual achievement and that deficit-based models of schooling actively prevent that achievement from being realised.

27. Mike Morath

Texas Education Agency

The Commissioner of Education is the single most powerful individual in Texas public education, responsible for a system serving more than 5.5 million students. Mike Morath, appointed by Governor Abbott in 2016 and confirmed unanimously by the Texas Senate, has spent a decade using the tools of the Texas accountability system, including A-F school ratings, state intervention authority, and the management of federal education funds, to drive academic improvement. The state takeovers of Houston ISD, Fort Worth ISD, and Lake Worth ISD under his leadership have been deeply contested and have produced both genuine academic gains and serious community grievances.

His term as Commissioner is scheduled to end June 30, 2026. The decisions he has made about what Texas public education should look like, from the Teacher Incentive Allotment to the management of state takeovers, have defined the field for a generation of Texas school leaders regardless of whether they agree with his approach.

Category 6: Bilingual Education, Equity, and Community Voices

Texas is the most linguistically and demographically complex state in the country. More than half of Texas public school students are Latino. The state has the largest population of English learners of any state in the nation. And the communities most affected by public school decisions, particularly around funding, discipline, and access to enriched curriculum, are often the communities least represented in the rooms where those decisions are made. The voices in this category represent the work of bringing those communities into the conversation.

28. Dr. Diana Sayavedra

Education Austin

Education Austin is the primary teacher union and employee association for Austin ISD, and as its leader, Diana Sayavedra represents more than 5,000 educators and support professionals who work in one of the most publicly scrutinised school districts in Texas. The Austin ISD state takeover threat, the district's response to TEA accountability pressures, and the school board conflicts of recent years have made the union's voice unusually significant. Sayavedra brings a bilingual, community-grounded perspective to the advocacy work that reflects both her own background and the demographics of the Austin ISD workforce she represents. Her work on teacher conditions as a prerequisite for student outcomes is a consistent and necessary counterpoint to accountability conversations that focus almost exclusively on test scores.

29. Dr. Sharron Walker

Texas Association of Black School Educators

The Texas Association of Black School Educators advocates for Black students and Black educators in a state where their interests are frequently invisible in the dominant education policy debates. Dr. Sharron Walker leads that work with a combination of deep knowledge of Texas education law and policy and genuine engagement with the communities whose children are most directly affected. Her advocacy spans school discipline reform, equitable access to advanced coursework, teacher diversity, and the ongoing conversation about what the state's voucher programme means for predominantly Black public schools. Her voice represents a constituency that has been systematically underserved by Texas public education institutions and deserves significantly more attention in the conversations that shape them.

30. Dr. Michael Hinojosa

Education Consultant (Former Dallas ISD)

Michael Hinojosa served as Superintendent of Dallas ISD for two separate tenures, accumulating more than a decade of experience leading what was, during much of that time, the second-largest school district in Texas. His tenure spanned the district's aggressive expansion of early childhood programmes, its management of the 2017 hurricane recovery, and its ongoing work to close achievement gaps in one of the most economically and racially diverse urban school systems in the country. Now working as an education consultant, Hinojosa brings the perspective of someone who has spent decades on the most difficult operational decisions in a large urban school system and who has earned the credibility to comment on what actually works.

31. Dr. Kelli Moulton

Corsicana ISD

Kelli Moulton serves as both superintendent of Corsicana ISD in Central Texas and as an executive superintendent within TASA's organisational structure. She chaired the Raise Your Hand Texas Measure What Matters Council on Assessment and Accountability, one of the most substantive multi-stakeholder efforts to rethink how Texas measures school success. Her dual role as a practising district leader and a statewide organisational actor gives her a perspective on the relationship between policy design and operational reality that most people on either side of that divide cannot access. Corsicana ISD is a mid-sized Central Texas district whose challenges, including demographic change, funding pressure, and the complexity of serving a community with significant rural and urban elements, are representative of a large part of Texas that is underrepresented in the dominant education policy conversation.

Category 7: Rising Voices Reshaping What Is Possible

This final category gathers four voices who are building their contributions in ways that have not yet attracted the national attention their work deserves. They represent the next wave of leadership thinking in Texas public education.

32. Dr. Travis Hearn

Texas Principal and Author

Travis Hearn is a Texas school principal and author whose work on social emotional learning, positive school culture, and the connection between educator wellbeing and student outcomes has built a genuine following among Texas campus leaders. His public speaking and writing draw on the specific experience of leading a campus through the pressures that Texas school leaders face right now, including the aftermath of school safety incidents, the weight of accountability ratings, and the challenge of building a team culture that supports teachers well enough to keep them in the profession. His grounded, human-centred approach represents what is possible when campus leadership is treated as a genuine intellectual discipline rather than an administrative function.

33. Dr. Martha Cantu

Texas Education Consultant

Martha Cantu spent her career as a Texas superintendent before transitioning to consulting work that supports school districts navigating leadership transitions, strategic planning, and governance challenges. Her particular expertise in the relationship between boards and superintendents, and the ways that dysfunctional board dynamics undermine academic progress even in well-resourced districts, reflects decades of watching what actually makes public schools work or fail. Her consulting work keeps her close to the operational reality of Texas districts in ways that most policy researchers never access.

34. Dr. Jeannie Meza-Chavez

Fabens ISD

Fabens ISD sits on the Texas-Mexico border in El Paso County, and its superintendent Jeannie Meza-Chavez leads one of the most geographically and demographically distinct school systems in the state. Her work navigating the intersection of immigration policy, bilingual education, family engagement, and chronic underfunding in a border community represents a form of public school leadership that is genuinely unlike anything being practised in Austin, Houston, or Dallas. As a TASA officer for 2025-26, she brings that perspective into the statewide leadership conversation and ensures that border communities are not invisible in the policy debates that shape them. Her voice is essential to any honest account of what Texas public education looks like across its full geographic and demographic range.

35. Dr. Pauline Dow

Georgetown ISD

Georgetown ISD is one of the fastest-growing districts in Texas, sitting in the corridor of rapid residential development that runs from Austin north toward the Hill Country. Pauline Dow has led the district through that growth with a sustained focus on maintaining the relational culture that makes high-growth districts feel like communities rather than intake systems. Her participation in the TASA Future-Ready Superintendents Leadership Network and her writing on what student-centred schools look like in practice reflects a thoughtful practitioner who is actively contributing to the field while managing one of its most demanding operational challenges.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

A number of voices considered for this list did not make the final 35 for reasons worth being transparent about. Elisa Villanueva Beard of Teach For America has done genuinely important work in Texas and nationally, but her profile has grown to a scale where a mention in a list like this offers no meaningful professional upside and her primary public engagement happens at a level well above mid-sized consulting blogs.

Several researchers from institutions outside Texas were considered but ultimately excluded in favour of voices with deeper Texas-specific context. A handful of promising campus-level voices were assessed but their public output had not yet reached the level of consistency and substance that would make their inclusion meaningful for readers.

It is worth acknowledging that the field has voices everyone already knows, including Malcolm Gladwell, whose work on education has been influential but who approaches it as a journalist rather than a practitioner, and Susan Cain, whose research on introversion touches education but sits at some distance from the specific challenges of Texas public schools. These are foundational voices for anyone interested in thinking, learning, and organisations broadly. This list is specifically about the people doing the most valuable work on Texas public education right now.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Engaging With Texas Education Thought Leaders

The first and most common mistake is treating the Texas education policy debate as binary. The conversation about school vouchers, accountability, and funding does not divide cleanly into pro-reform and pro-public-school camps, and anyone who tells you it does is simplifying for convenience. The most useful voices on this list, including Anne Wicks, Angela Valenzuela, Chloe Latham Sikes, and Kevin Brown, all operate in the productive tension between policy approaches that are genuinely contested.

The second mistake is confusing national research with Texas-specific evidence. Texas has a unique funding formula, a unique accountability system, a unique demographic profile, and a unique political culture. Research from Massachusetts or Minnesota about what works in public schools does not travel directly to Texas without significant translation, and the Texas-focused researchers on this list are doing that translation work. Defaulting to national consensus when Texas-specific evidence exists is a form of laziness that the field can ill afford.

The third mistake is ignoring the bilingual education question. With more than 1.1 million emergent bilingual students in Texas public schools, and a structural teacher shortage in bilingual classrooms that is getting worse rather than better, the state's failure to treat bilingual education as a central strategic priority rather than a niche concern has compounding costs for student outcomes, community cohesion, and long-term economic productivity.

The fourth mistake is underestimating the significance of rural Texas. More than 700 of the state's 1,200 school districts are classified as rural. The challenges facing rural districts, including declining enrollment, distance from talent pipelines, and extreme sensitivity to local economic cycles, are different in kind from the challenges facing urban and suburban systems. The voices on this list from West Texas, Central Texas, and the border region are not supplementary to the main conversation. They are part of its necessary breadth.

The fifth mistake is treating the state takeover model as an unambiguous success or failure. The Houston ISD case is the largest and most scrutinised state intervention in American education history. The academic gains are real, documented by the state's own accountability system. The community grievances are also real and have been documented by researchers, journalists, and community advocates with equal rigour. Engaging seriously with the people on this list means holding both of those truths simultaneously.

Implementation Guide: How to Follow These Voices and Use What They Say

The most practical first step is to follow the LinkedIn accounts of the superintendents, researchers, and advocates on this list. LinkedIn has become the primary platform for professional education thought leadership, and many of the voices here, including Goffney, Shepherd, Salazar-Zamora, DeMatthews, and Chloe Latham Sikes, post substantive original content on a regular basis. A 30-minute weekly review of their posts will give you a more current picture of what is actually happening in Texas public education than most newsletters or education news sites.

The second step is to read the primary sources. IDRA's policy briefs, the TASA INSIGHT publication, the Bush Institute's monthly education newsletter, and the Commit Partnership's research reports are all free, accessible, and written by people with genuine expertise. They are more useful than almost any secondary source.

The third step is to engage rather than just consume. Several of the people on this list, particularly the mid-career superintendents, researchers, and advocates in the mid-tier follower range, are genuinely responsive to substantive questions and comments on their public posts. A thoughtful question or a genuine acknowledgement of their work is more likely to generate a real conversation than a form letter through a speaker bureau.

The fourth step is to contextualise what you read. Texas education debates tend to generate more heat than light, particularly when they involve vouchers, state takeovers, or accountability system reform. The most useful thing any school leader can do with the ideas they encounter from these voices is to test them against the specific demographic, funding, and political context of their own district or organisation before forming strong opinions.

Jonno White works with school leadership teams to develop the communication skills, team culture, and shared decision-making practices that make it possible to act on good ideas rather than just collect them. If your leadership team wants to build the internal capacity to navigate the pressures these thinkers are describing, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the most influential voices in Texas public education right now?

The most influential single voice is Commissioner Mike Morath at the Texas Education Agency, whose authority over funding distribution, accountability ratings, and state interventions shapes every other decision in the system. Beyond government authority, the most influential voices are those who combine research credibility with public presence and community relationships, a combination that Angela Valenzuela, David DeMatthews, LaTonya Goffney, and Chloe Latham Sikes all embody in different ways.

What are the biggest challenges facing Texas public schools in 2025-26?

The three most pressing challenges are the teacher shortage, which has left more than half of newly hired teachers in recent years without formal certification; the funding uncertainty created by the combination of the $8.5 billion HB 2 investment and the parallel drain of the $1 billion voucher programme; and the first non-pandemic enrollment decline in nearly four decades, with Latino students accounting for the vast majority of the drop.

How can I stay current on Texas education policy?

Following IDRA's Texas Education Advocacy page, TASA's public communications, the Bush Institute's monthly education newsletter, and the Texas Tribune's education coverage gives you the broadest range of perspectives. The LinkedIn feeds of the researchers and advocates on this list are also consistently among the most current and substantive sources available.

What is the Texas voucher programme and how does it affect public schools?

Passed in 2025 and launching in the 2026-27 school year, the Texas Education Freedom Account programme provides families with up to $10,500 per year in state funds for private school tuition or homeschooling costs. With an initial budget of $1 billion and nearly 275,000 applicants, the programme is one of the largest school choice initiatives in the country. Public school advocates argue it drains funding from already under-resourced public schools. Supporters argue it expands options for families whose children are not well-served by their local public school. The evidence on its likely impact is genuinely contested and the voices on this list represent a range of perspectives on that question.

Can I hire someone to facilitate leadership development workshops for my school leadership team?

Yes. Jonno White is a Brisbane-based leadership consultant and Certified Working Genius Facilitator who works with school leadership teams around the world, including in the United States, UK, Australia, Singapore, Canada, and beyond. He is the bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, which has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast across 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. He delivers workshops, keynotes, executive offsites, and one-to-one coaching for school principals, superintendent leadership teams, and school boards. International travel is often far more affordable than clients expect. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss what would work for your team.

How was this list compiled?

The list was compiled through a systematic review of current research, policy advocacy, media coverage, and professional output across the Texas public education field. Candidates were assessed for genuine, current contribution to the field, geographic and disciplinary diversity, and the depth and specificity of their engagement with the issues that are most consequential for Texas public schools right now. The list deliberately surfaces voices that are doing significant work but are not yet part of the national education media cycle.

Final Thoughts

Texas public education is operating in one of the most genuinely difficult environments in its modern history. The people on this list are not observers of that difficulty. They are working inside it, publishing despite it, advocating through it, and leading organisations that depend on getting the most important questions right. Following their work is one of the highest-leverage professional development investments a school leader, policymaker, or education advocate can make.

The scale of what is at stake in Texas public education is worth sitting with. Five and a half million students. One in ten American public school children. A state whose decisions about teacher pay, school accountability, bilingual education, and the proper relationship between public and private schooling will shape the national debate for years. The people on this list understand that scale and take it seriously.

If you are leading a school or school system and you want support building the culture, communication, and team dynamics that make it possible to act on the ideas these thinkers are advancing, Jonno White is available to work with you. He is the bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, which has sold over 10,000 copies globally, host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast across 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries, and a Certified Working Genius Facilitator who has worked with school leadership teams around the world. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to start a conversation.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits across the UK, India, Australia, Canada, Mongolia, New Zealand, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, USA, Finland, Namibia, and more. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Next Read: 13 Proven Strategies for Managing Parents in Schools

The most common complaint Jonno White hears from school principals is not about budgets, compliance, or even student behaviour. It is about parents. More specifically, it is about the weight of managing parents who are more present, more reactive, and more public than any generation of school families before them. A principal in a regional Australian independent school recently described her Monday morning routine: check the community Facebook group before checking her email, because that is where she finds out what is actually happening in her school.

If you recognise that experience, this article was written for you.

Keep reading: https://www.consultclarity.org/post/managing-parents-in-schools