The Lawmaker Who Sat on the Public Education Committee — and Sold DEI to the Schools He Oversaw.

Texas state Rep. James Talarico (D-TX) — now the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate against Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) — spent six years moonlighting as an “equitable education” consultant for a firm that built diversity, equity, and inclusion plans for Texas public schools. He joined MAYA Consulting in 2019 and stayed on the payroll until October 2025, one month after he launched his Senate campaign, according to his financial disclosure. The firm paid him $83,333.40 in 2025 alone.

The conflict is not subtle. For much of that stretch Talarico sat on the Texas House Committee on Public Education — the panel that writes the rules for the same districts his firm was selling consulting services to. While he served on it, watchdog records show MAYA Consulting collected more than $1,503,573.75 from individual Texas school districts and roughly $5,161,750 from the Texas Education Agency between 2018 and 2023.

And the product was not neutral. MAYA — since rebranded as VIDA Collaborative — describes its work as “rooted in our diversity, equity, and inclusion philosophy.” With Talarico’s help, the Washington Free Beacon reported, it pushed critical race theory and DEI into Texas classrooms at the height of 2020, partnered with districts to run race-equity programming, and donated $5,000to an Austin nonprofit that was simultaneously calling to defund the city’s police. This is the story of a public official who legislated on schools by day and billed them by the contract.

• $83,333.40 — paid to Talarico by MAYA Consulting in 2025, per his U.S. Senate financial disclosure — the year he left the firm · Source: Washington Free Beacon, LegiStorm
• 2019–Oct 2025 — his tenure as a paid 'equitable education' consultant; he quit one month after launching his Senate campaign · Source: Washington Free Beacon
• $1.5M+ — MAYA Consulting payments from Texas school districts (Beaumont, Edgewood, Galveston, Dallas ISDs) while Talarico sat on the Public Education Committee · Source: Defending Education
• $5.16M — total paid to MAYA Consulting by the Texas Education Agency, 2018 to February 2023 · Source: Defending Education
• HB 4111 — Talarico's 2021 bill to force large Texas districts to hire a 'diversity, equity, and inclusion officer' — it died in the GOP legislature · Source: Texas Legislature Online

In 2019, Talarico announced on Facebook that he was joining MAYA Consulting, where he would be “working with districts, nonprofits, and communities to build excellent and equitable educational opportunities.” He had been elected to the Texas House the year before. The arrangement — sitting legislator on the side payroll of a firm selling services to public school systems — would run for six years. He did not leave until October 2025, a month after he launched his U.S. Senate bid, when the optics of a Senate candidate billing school districts for DEI consulting presumably became untenable.

The firm itself is unambiguous about what it sells. MAYA — now VIDA Collaborative — was founded in 2017 by Larkin Tackett, a former IDEA Public Schools executive who served in the U.S. Department of Education under the Obama administration. Its own materials describe the practice as “rooted in our diversity, equity, and inclusion philosophy,” offering “strategic planning… and diversity, equity, and inclusion support in the education sector.” When Barack Obama endorsed Talarico in 2020, MAYA congratulated its own consultant publicly: “If you’re peaking, we’re peaking! Congrats on your endorsement, @jamestalarico!”

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MAYA’s footprint in Texas schools was concrete. With Talarico’s help, the Free Beacon reported, the firm worked to bring critical race theory and DEI to Texas classrooms during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 — partnering with districts such as Snyder Independent School District in West Texas to support “diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.” In Austin, where Talarico lives, it promoted a series of monthly “RaceTalks” organized by the local district’s “Race Equity Council,” which called on parents to “explore” their “pushback and triggers and name systemic barriers that form as a result.”

The firm’s politics extended past the classroom. MAYA contributed $5,000 to the Austin Justice Coalition around the same time the coalition was calling to defund the Austin Police Department, and donated another $5,000to GLSEN, the LGBTQ education-advocacy group. None of this was hidden ideology adjacent to a paycheck; it was the paycheck. Talarico was paid to advance a specific worldview inside public institutions — the same institutions he was elected to oversee.

“Explore your pushback and triggers and name systemic barriers that form as a result.”

Austin ISD 'RaceTalks' programming promoted by MAYA Consulting · per Washington Free Beacon

Here is the fact that turns a side gig into an accountability story. Talarico served on the Texas House Committee on Public Education — the body that sets policy, funding rules, and oversight for the state’s school districts — while MAYA Consulting was billing those same districts. A records review by Defending Education found MAYA collected $1,503,573.75 from individual districts, including $484,000 from Beaumont ISD, $555,750 from Edgewood ISD, $183,326 from Galveston ISD, and $93,750 from Dallas ISD. The Texas Education Agency — the state agency the Public Education Committee oversees — paid MAYA $5,161,750 between 2018 and February 2023.

Talarico’s answer to the conflict question is narrow and legalistic. “Texas ethics laws prohibit an elected member of state government…from being employed by another political subdivision,” he wrote in a Facebook comment. “MAYA Consulting is a privately owned firm, not a political subdivision.” That may be technically true. It also dodges the point: the money flowed from public school districts and a state agency, through a private firm, to a lawmaker who voted on the rules governing both. His campaign has separately noted that the TEA awarded MAYA contracts for initiatives unrelated to equity — a defense that concedes the firm was on the state payroll.

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The clearest collision between Talarico’s public role and his private one came in 2021. While drawing pay from a DEI consulting firm, he filed House Bill 4111, which would have required every large Texas school district to hire a “diversity, equity, and inclusion officer.” The bill specified that such officers hold “significant professional experience” or “an approved certification” in DEI, and tasked them with “addressing systemic inequities that lead to differences in student achievement.” In other words: a state mandate to hire exactly the kind of specialist that firms like the one paying Talarico exist to supply and train.

HB 4111 went nowhere in the Republican-controlled legislature. But Talarico was loud about it — announcing on the platform then called Twitter that he was “co-authoring legislation to explicitly teach” DEI in schools. The disclosure question he never squarely answered: did the bill’s author tell the House he was, at that moment, on the payroll of a firm in the business of selling districts the DEI compliance the bill would have forced on them? When the same person writes the mandate and sells the service, voters are owed more than a parsing of which entities count as “political subdivisions.”

“MAYA Consulting is a privately owned firm, not a political subdivision.”

James Talarico (D-TX), defending the arrangement on Facebook · per Defending Education

The conflict web does not end with Talarico. According to Defending Education’s review, MAYA founder Larkin Tackettheld a role with direct authority over charter-school application approvals for the state — even as his firm held contracts touching charter-school providers. Layer that onto a sitting Public Education Committee member on the same firm’s payroll, and you have a consulting shop with one principal helping decide who gets to open schools and another principal helping write the laws those schools operate under. The firm sat at the intersection of policy, funding, and approval — the three levers public education runs on.

Defending Education also pinned the timeline: Talarico was still listed on the company’s website as recently as January 20, 2023, and was scrubbed from it by May 2, 2023 — quietly, mid-session, as scrutiny of DEI in Texas schools intensified at the Capitol. He did not actually leave the payroll, his later disclosures show, until October 2025. The website edit removed the appearance of the arrangement two and a half years before the arrangement itself ended.

None of the contracts described here are alleged to be illegal, and Talarico has not been charged with anything. The accountability question is narrower and harder to wave away: a lawmaker who sat on the committee overseeing Texas public schools spent six years drawing pay from a firm selling those schools an ideological product — and authored a bill that would have written that product into state law. He defends it with a technical reading of the ethics code. Voters in a Senate race decided in November 2026 are entitled to weigh whether “not a political subdivision” is the standard they want from the person asking for a six-year term.

Talarico has built his Senate campaign on calling Ken Paxton (R)“the most corrupt politician in America.” That framing invites the comparison his own record now answers. We will update this page if Talarico, his campaign, the Texas Ethics Commission, or the named school districts release additional documentation.

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Last updated June 11, 2026