A new transparency tool created by the Texas Education Agency reveals an alarming number of the state’s educators are committing crimes.
The state’s new Educator Misconduct Reporting Dashboard displays data on reports submitted to the TEA from various sources—including fingerprint-based criminal history alerts from the Texas Department of Public Safety and the FBI.
Dashboard data for the first eight months of the 2026 fiscal year, from September 2025 through April 2026, shows 17,060 criminal history alerts. That’s an average of 2,133 Texas school employees every month who are arrested or have their criminal records updated.
In fiscal 2025, the monthly average was 1,938, with a total of 23,257 criminal history updates for the year.
For both years, non-certified school employees accounted for three-quarters of the criminal alerts.
Escalating Educator Misconduct Reports
A skyrocketing number of educators are also being accused of violent and sexual misconduct involving students.
Educator misconduct reports submitted through the TEA’s complaint reporting portal have reached 10,863 so far in fiscal 2026, averaging 1,552 a month.
That number is a big increase from 2025’s total of 6,456 misconduct reports and monthly average of 538.
The dashboard also displays the number of investigations opened by TEA as a result of the misconduct reports received by the agency and breaks them down by complaint category.
So far this year, TEA’s Educator Investigations Division is opening an average of 1,158 investigations a month—more than double last year’s average of 423 a month.
Half of the 8,104 complaints currently being investigated involve school-related violence. The monthly average of investigations opened into educators accused of violence toward students has more than tripled since last year, from 180 to 647.
