For decades, parents in the United States have faced the same frustrating reality: if you wanted to know whether the adult standing in front of your child's classroom had a history of misconduct, you had almost no reliable way to find out. School districts investigated internally. Complaints disappeared into filing cabinets. Educators who lost their jobs in one district could often resurface in another town, another county, sometimes another state, with no public record following them. Parents were told to trust the system. Too often, the system gave them no reason to.

Texas just changed that. On June 2, 2026, the Texas Education Agency launched the Educator Misconduct Dashboard, a public, searchable tool that lays out — in plain numbers, updated regularly — how many misconduct reports are coming in, how many investigations are open, what disciplinary actions have been taken, and who has been permanently barred from working in a Texas classroom. It is, without exaggeration, one of the most transparent state-level accountability tools of its kind anywhere in the country.

This matters to every parent reading this newsletter, whether you live in Texas or not. It matters because it proves something that child-safety advocates have argued for years: this kind of transparency is possible. It is not a fantasy, not a bureaucratic impossibility, not something that requires new federal legislation or a decade of lawsuits to achieve. One state legislature decided to build it, and it exists. The only question left is why the other forty-nine haven't done the same.

There is also a harder truth underneath all of this, and it's one worth saying plainly before we go any further: the danger to your child is far more likely to come from someone you already know and trust than from a stranger. According to RAINN, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, 93 percent of child sexual abuse victims know the person who abused them. Fifty-nine percent are abused by an acquaintance — a coach, a babysitter, a family friend, a teacher, a youth group leader. Thirty-four percent are abused by a family member. Only 7 percent of perpetrators are strangers.

"Stranger danger" is not a useless concept, but it is an incomplete one, and treating it as the whole picture leaves parents unprepared for where the real risk actually lives. The adults who spend the most unsupervised time with your child — the ones who coach their team, drive their bus, teach their class, or watch them after school — are, statistically, the adults most likely to be the source of harm if harm comes at all. That is exactly why a tool like the Educator Misconduct Dashboard matters so much. It is not built to catch a stranger in a van outside the school gate. It is built to track the people already inside the building, already holding a badge, already trusted with access — because that is where the data says the actual risk sits.

The dashboard did not appear out of nowhere. It was required by Senate Bill 571, passed by the 89th Texas Legislature, which expanded reporting requirements for misconduct in Texas schools. To oversee the new system, the state created a position that did not previously exist: Inspector General for Educator Misconduct. Levi Fuller became the first person to hold that title, and he has been direct about what the tool is meant to do.

"One of the things that at the TEA we're trying to do is we're trying to expand transparency for parents, advocates, schools, and school professionals, including superintendents, teachers," Fuller explained when the dashboard launched. "So one of these projects obviously is the dashboard that we are now releasing. It's the educator misconduct reporting dashboard."

The dashboard is organized into four sections, and each one answers a different question a parent might have.

All Misconduct Reports shows exactly how many complaints have been filed against Texas educators, broken down by who reported them — superintendents, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, general public complaints, and a national organization called NASDTEC. This section also includes criminal history alerts generated through fingerprint-based background checks run by the Texas Department of Public Safety and the FBI.

Educator Investigations tracks what happens after a report is filed. Not every complaint leads to a formal investigation, but the dashboard shows how many did, and what categories those investigations fall into — violence, inappropriate relationships, sexual misconduct, fraud, and other conduct that threatens student safety.

SBEC Disciplinary Actions covers what the State Board for Educator Certification actually did once an investigation concluded. This is where a parent can see whether an educator was sanctioned, suspended, or had their certification revoked entirely.

Do Not Hire Registry is perhaps the most important tab of all. It is a publicly searchable list of individuals who are permanently ineligible for employment in any Texas public school due to serious misconduct or a disqualifying criminal history. If a name appears here, that person cannot legally be hired to work around children in a Texas public school again, and any parent can check that fact for themselves in seconds.

The entire system sits inside a larger hub the TEA calls the Student Protection Resource Center, which also includes an Educator Certificate Lookup tool — allowing a parent to type in a teacher's name and see their certification status directly — along with guidance on how to report suspected abuse, neglect, or misconduct involving a student.

Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath framed the launch in terms that should resonate with every parent, regardless of what state they live in: "Transparency and public trust in our education system are central to ensuring our schools can accomplish their core mission of educating the next generation. This dashboard and associated resources reflect our commitment to ensuring the safety of all students and the integrity of those privileged to serve in our classrooms."

It is one thing to say a dashboard exists. It is another to look directly at what it reveals, because the scale of what has been happening in Texas classrooms — quietly, without public visibility, for years — is significant.

Since the dashboard began tracking data under the new reporting requirements, Texas has logged more than 13,000 misconduct reports in a single school year, more than double the number recorded the year before. The Texas Education Agency has been careful to note that some of this increase likely reflects better reporting rather than a sudden explosion in bad behavior — new legal requirements under SB 571 mean more incidents are being formally logged that might have gone unrecorded in the past. But even accounting for that, the raw investigation numbers are sobering.

In the 2026 fiscal year, the TEA opened more than 9,700 formal investigations into Texas educators. Of those, more than 5,000 involved some form of violence in a school setting. Roughly 1,400 investigations centered on inappropriate relationships between an adult educator and a student. And 441 investigations were specifically classified as sexual misconduct.

Separately, the dashboard tracks criminal history alerts — flags generated when a fingerprint-based background check turns up a criminal record tied to someone working in or applying to work in a Texas school. In fiscal year 2026 alone, the system generated more than 17,000 of these alerts, averaging over 2,100 per month. The year before, the number was even higher: more than 23,000 alerts, averaging nearly 2,000 a month.

The TEA is careful to point out that a criminal history alert does not automatically mean someone committed misconduct in a school setting — a flag can reflect an old charge, a resolved case, or a record unrelated to their fitness to work with children. But the sheer volume of alerts underscores exactly why background checks, fingerprinting systems, and continuous monitoring matter as much as they do. These are not hypothetical risks. They are documented, recurring events happening in real schools, month after month, across a state with more than five million public school students.

One additional detail from the data deserves attention: a large share of the misconduct reports and criminal history alerts — roughly three out of every four — involve individuals who are not certified teachers. That includes bus drivers, coaches, teacher's aides, cafeteria staff, and other school employees who interact with children daily but fall outside the traditional licensing system that tracks certified teachers. This is a critical point for parents to understand. A predator does not need a teaching certificate to gain access to your child. Texas's dashboard captures that reality instead of hiding it behind a narrower definition of "educator."

This detail lines up exactly with what RAINN's research has shown for years about who actually harms children. It is rarely the stranger. It is far more often the trusted adult with legitimate, ongoing access — the coach who drives the team van, the aide who supervises recess, the tutor who works with a child one-on-one after hours. A dashboard that only tracked licensed classroom teachers would miss a huge share of the actual risk. A dashboard that tracks every adult with school-based access to children, the way Texas's does, is built around the real pattern of abuse rather than the popular myth of it.

Knowing a tool exists is not the same as knowing how to use it, so here is the practical version.

If you want to check whether a specific teacher, coach, or staff member at your child's school has any record of formal disciplinary action, start with the Educator Certificate Lookup inside the Student Protection Resource Center. You can search by name and see the current certification status of any licensed Texas educator, including whether any sanctions are attached to that certificate.

If you want to know whether a specific individual — certified or not — is barred entirely from working in Texas public schools, check the Do Not Hire Registry. This list exists specifically because of serious misconduct or a disqualifying criminal history. It is the strongest, most direct answer a parent can get, and it is free and public.

If you want to understand the bigger picture — how many reports your district or the state as a whole is generating, what kinds of misconduct are being investigated, and how those numbers have changed over time — the dashboard itself is where that data lives, broken into the four categories described above.

None of these tools require a records request, a phone call to the district, or a lawyer. They are built to be checked by any parent, on any device, in a matter of minutes. That is the entire point.

Here is the uncomfortable truth this dashboard forces into the open: Texas did not solve a Texas-only problem. Every state in the country has educators, coaches, and school staff. Every state has some percentage of those adults who should not be anywhere near children. And in the overwhelming majority of states, there is no public, centralized, regularly updated tool that lets a parent check any of it.

Instead, most states rely on a private, employer-only system called the NASDTEC Educator Information Clearinghouse — a national database that shares information about disciplinary actions between state education agencies and school district hiring officials. It is a useful tool for the professionals who use it, but it is not built for parents. A mother in Ohio or a father in Georgia cannot log in and check a name the way a Texas parent now can through the Do Not Hire Registry. The information may technically exist somewhere in a system, but it is walled off from the public who arguably has the most at stake.

This patchwork approach — different rules, different transparency levels, different reporting requirements in every one of the fifty states — is precisely the kind of gap that allows problems to persist. An educator who loses their license in one state does not automatically lose the ability to work with children in a different state, unless every state involved is actually communicating and cross-checking records consistently. A parent who moves from Texas to a neighboring state loses access to the exact kind of transparency their previous state had just built.

Child-safety advocates have said for years that the fight against child exploitation is hampered by exactly this kind of fragmentation. FBI data backs this up on a national level. According to the FBI, child exploitation cases — including production and distribution of exploitative material, sex trafficking, sextortion, child enticement, and grooming — have grown substantially over the past several years. FBI Supervisory Special Agent Dustin Grant has described a "steady increase year over year" in these crimes, driven in large part by the explosive growth of social media platforms and how easily children now create accounts and interact with strangers online. In fiscal year 2022, the FBI opened 4,881 child exploitation cases and made 2,682 arrests. By fiscal year 2025, the number of cases had grown by more than 44 percent to 7,058, with arrests climbing to 3,097.

That is the national backdrop against which every state's approach to educator oversight has to be measured. If the threat to children is growing at the national level, and it clearly is, then transparency and accountability tools at the state and local level need to grow just as fast. A single state doing this well is a proof of concept. Fifty states doing this well is a national safety net.

There is a reason transparency matters beyond simply "letting parents look things up." When accountability is scattered — when one district handles a case one way, another district handles a nearly identical case a completely different way, and there is no public record connecting the dots — it becomes almost impossible to understand the actual scope of the problem, let alone fix it.

Right now, across the country, the handling of child sexual abuse and exploitation cases involving educators still varies enormously depending on which courtroom, which judge, and which jurisdiction a case lands in. Sentencing outcomes for strikingly similar offenses can differ wildly from one county to the next. Without consistent, centralized, public data tracking these cases from the initial report all the way through investigation, discipline, and — where applicable — criminal prosecution, it is nearly impossible to hold the system itself accountable for those inconsistencies. You cannot fix what you cannot see, and for too long, this entire category of harm has been effectively invisible to the public that funds these schools and entrusts them with their children.

This is the real argument for what Texas has built, and the real argument for why it should not stop at the Texas border. A dashboard like this does more than let one parent check one teacher's name. Over time, it builds a public record. It lets researchers, journalists, lawmakers, and advocacy organizations analyze patterns across districts and across years. It creates the kind of accountability that pressure alone — angry parents at school board meetings, isolated news stories, one-off lawsuits — has never been able to produce on its own. Data, consistently collected and made public, is what allows a state, and eventually a country, to see the full size of a problem instead of a scattered collection of individual tragedies.

Public data only stays public if people keep looking at it, writing about it, and holding officials accountable for maintaining it. In Texas, independent outlets have taken that responsibility seriously. Texas Scorecard, an independent news organization, has run an ongoing "Teacher/Predators" investigative series covering exactly this issue — reporting on cases like a former Texas state trooper sentenced to ten years in federal prison for online child exploitation, and tracking state legislative efforts related to sentencing for offenders convicted of crimes against children. Reporter Erin Anderson has been a consistent voice in that coverage, documenting individual cases and following the legislative process as Texas lawmakers work through additional child-protection measures. That kind of sustained local reporting is part of what keeps pressure on a system like this one to stay transparent instead of quietly rolling back once the initial headlines fade.

That is worth remembering for anyone in any other state who wants this kind of tool built where they live. A dashboard is only as strong as the public attention that keeps demanding it exist, keeps checking it, and keeps asking, "why doesn't our state have this too?"

Texas did not need to invent new technology to build this dashboard. It needed a legislature willing to require the reporting, an agency willing to organize the data, and a commitment to making the results public instead of internal. Every other state has that same capability. What most of them lack is the legislative mandate forcing it to happen.

If you live outside Texas and you're reading this wondering why your own state doesn't have something similar, the honest answer is: it could, and it should. The building blocks already exist — most states already collect some version of this information internally, through certification boards, background check systems, and district reporting requirements. What's missing in the vast majority of states is the decision to consolidate that information and hand it to the public in a usable, searchable format, the way Texas just did.

That is a policy choice, not a technical barrier. It requires state lawmakers willing to pass something like Senate Bill 571, and it requires state education agencies willing to build and maintain the resulting tool. Parents, school safety advocates, and organizations focused on protecting children have real leverage here — this is exactly the kind of concrete, achievable ask that can be brought directly to state legislators, school boards, and education agency leadership. "Build what Texas built" is a far easier sell than asking for an entirely new system from scratch, because there is already a working model to point to.

It would be reasonable at this point to ask why child-safety organizations, advocacy groups, or private individuals simply don't build this themselves in the states that don't have it. The honest answer is that they can't — not the way it needs to exist.

A tool like the Educator Misconduct Dashboard depends on direct access to government-held records: certification files held by state licensing boards, fingerprint-based criminal history checks run through the FBI and state law enforcement, confidential investigation files maintained by education agencies, and disciplinary action records that are often legally restricted until a case is fully resolved. No nonprofit, no newsroom, and no private advocate has the legal authority to pull that data directly the way a state agency does. Some of it simply isn't public at all until a legislature passes a law requiring it to be. Building a private, unofficial version would mean working with incomplete, outdated, or second-hand information — which could be worse than having no tool at all, because it would give parents false confidence in data that isn't reliable.

That is why this has to come from the states themselves. It requires a legislature passing a bill, the way Texas passed Senate Bill 571. It requires a state education agency willing to build and maintain the resulting system, the way the Texas Education Agency did. It requires an ongoing budget commitment, because a dashboard that isn't updated regularly becomes useless within a year. This is not a weekend coding project. It is a policy decision, and policy decisions get made when enough constituents demand them.

So here is the direct ask: if your state does not have a tool like this, call your state representative and your state senator and tell them you want one.

You do not need to be a policy expert to make that call effective. You need three things: the fact that Texas already built this and it works, the SB 571 model to point to as an example, and your own voice as a parent or constituent asking why your state hasn't done the same. Forward this article to your representative's office if it helps make the case. Bring it to a school board meeting. Share it with other parents in your district and ask them to make the same call. Legislators respond to volume — one phone call is easy to ignore, but a hundred calls asking for the same specific, achievable thing is very hard to.

This is the kind of advocacy that actually moves the needle. It is not abstract. It is not asking for something that doesn't already exist somewhere and work. It is asking your state to copy a model that a neighboring state already built, tested, and is currently running. That is about as low a bar as government accountability asks ever get, and it is exactly why every parent reading this should feel comfortable picking up the phone.

Texas parents can now do something that was effectively impossible a year ago: pull up a public website and check, in minutes, whether an adult working at their child's school has a documented history of misconduct, sits on the state's permanent Do Not Hire list, or has an active investigation on record. That is not a small thing. It is the kind of basic transparency that should have existed everywhere, for every parent, for years.

It didn't. Now, in at least one state, it does. The next question — the one every parent, journalist, and lawmaker outside Texas should be asking their own state officials — is simple: if Texas could build this, why hasn't your state done the same?

That question deserves an answer. And until every state can give one, the work of tracking, reporting, and demanding this kind of transparency has to continue, state by state, until there is nowhere left for accountability to hide.