Public schools are the biggest thing your Texas taxes pay for. You should be able to see inside.

For most Texas families, school property taxes are the single largest line on the tax bill — thousands of dollars a year. Yet what that money actually does, whether it's working, and how your district compares is buried in state spreadsheets almost nobody reads. This guide exists to change that.

The problem

The numbers that decide how your schools are funded — budgets, tax rates, recapture, debt, test results, teacher pay and turnover, bond elections — are all public. But "public" and "readable" are not the same thing. They live in dozens of separate state files, in the language of accountants and agencies. A parent choosing a neighborhood, a taxpayer wondering where the money went, or a reporter on deadline can't reasonably piece them together. So almost no one does.

What we did about it

We gathered 17 years of the Texas Education Agency's and Comptroller's own records — every district's audited finances, property values and tax bills, STAAR results, teacher data, and every school bond back to 1958 — 6.6 million data points in all. Then we translated them into plain English: what your district collects, where each dollar goes, what it borrowed and for what, and what the spending actually bought in results. Every figure links back to the state source it came from. Nothing is estimated, ranked, or spun.

Why you should care

• If you're a parent — see what a district actually delivers for students before you choose a neighborhood, a home, or a school. Ratings mostly reflect how wealthy a community already is; this shows what the district itself does with what it has.
• If you're a taxpayer or grandparent — see exactly where your school taxes go, how much leaves your district under recapture, and whether the spending is buying results.
• If you're a teacher — see pay, class sizes, and turnover against genuinely comparable districts, not the whole state average.
• If you're a reporter — a sourced, district-by-district starting point for any story, with the receipts already attached.
• If you're a school board member or trustee — benchmark your district against its real structural peers and see what actually moves outcomes.

What we stand for

• Independent. Not a TEA product, not affiliated with any district, and nothing to sell. The numbers are the state's; the plain-English framing is ours.
• Sourced. Every figure traces back to an official record. If we can't source it, we don't show it.
• Honest, even when it's inconvenient. We report what the data says — including that spending $2,000 more per student changed results by too little to tell apart from zero, and that some celebrated turnarounds left their most vulnerable students behind.
• No accusations, no rankings. Anomaly flags are questions worth asking, not findings of wrongdoing. We never rank or endorse a district or community.
• Privacy first. District-level aggregates only — no student, family, or personnel data is collected, stored, or shown. "Find my district" on the map runs entirely in your browser. We measure the site, never the visitor — here is exactly what that means.
• Open. The whole project is open source (MIT), so anyone can check our work.

What we collect (and what we don't)

For almost everyone who visits, we want to know whether this site is useful and what people come here to find out — and that does not require knowing who you are, so we don't collect it. There is no advertising, no third-party tracker, and nothing is ever sold or shared. There is one exception, and we would rather state it plainly than bury it: if you arrived by clicking a link in an email we sent you personally, that visit is measured individually. The details are below.

• Page views, as daily totals. When a page loads we add 1 to a counter for that page, that day, whether the screen was a phone or a desktop, and which site you came from (the site's name only, like "google.com" — never the full link). That's the whole record. There is no row for your visit and no clock time, so two people who read the same page today are indistinguishable in our data.
• The exception: people we emailed directly. We write to Texas school superintendents to give them their district's report. Those emails contain a link with a code in it that is unique to that one message. If you click it, we record that the email was opened, that the link was clicked, which pages you then read, how long you spent, and whether you come back later — stored against that code, which identifies the address we wrote to. A cookie keeps the code on your device so a return visit is recognised.
  
  This applies only to people we mailed, and only once you click. It cannot begin any other way: there is no fingerprinting, and an ordinary visitor cannot fall into it. If you'd rather not be measured this way, don't click the link — or reply and ask us to delete your record, and we will remove the whole stream. Unsubscribing stops the emails; asking us to delete removes what was already collected.
• Questions you type into "Ask anything." We keep the question and the answer, because what Texans want to know about their schools is what should shape this site. The questions in one sitting are stored together, so we can see what someone was working out — asking about debt, then about bonds, then about neighbouring districts tells us something no single question does. That group carries no IP address, no device details and no identity: it is an unnamed conversation, and there is nothing in it that can be traced back to you. Please don't type personal details into it; there's no reason to, and we'd rather not have them.
• Anything you write in the beta feedback box. We keep what you wrote, which page you were on, and an email address only if you choose to give one — it is never required, and leaving it blank does not change anything. This is the one place on the site where your own words are stored, and it exists because the numbers can tell us what people looked at but never what they came for and could not find.
• What we never collect from an ordinary visitor: your IP address, cookies, a visitor or session ID, your precise location, or anything that could fingerprint your browser. If you did not arrive from an email we sent you, none of those exist for your visit. And we never track anyone across other websites — there is no third-party script here that could, for anybody.
• Your location stays on your device. "Find my district" uses your browser's location to work out which district you're standing in, entirely inside your browser. That location is never sent to us or to anyone else.

Who built it

Built by the team at Technology Automation Group (TAG ai), with one goal: helping families make better-informed decisions about where they raise their children, on the state's own records rather than reputation. Nobody outside this team influenced any number, method, or finding, and nothing here is real estate, financial, or investment advice.

Would you like one of these for your own data? The hard part was never the charts. It was making every number traceable back to the record it came from, and refusing to publish the ones that could not be — which is why this site will tell you when it does not know something. We build these for other public datasets, agencies and states. Tell us what you are trying to open up and we will tell you honestly whether it is worth doing.

Data disclaimer: An independent transparency tool presenting Texas Education Agency and Comptroller data, fiscal 2009–2025, for informational purposes only. Not an official TEA product, not an audit, and not financial, legal, or investment advice. District-level aggregates only. Every number is traceable to the State of Texas.