James Talarico, the progressive state representative now running for U.S. Senate in Texas, had his sixth-grade students write "Obama memoirs" when he was a public school teacher in San Antonio. Facebook posts from Talarico's teacher account, dated November 2012, show him celebrating the assignment and displaying student work on a classroom "Wall of Fame."
The posts surfaced as Talarico positions himself as a serious contender for a critical Senate seat this November, where he will face either incumbent Sen. John Cornyn or state Attorney General Ken Paxton, who are currently locked in a bitter primary runoff set to come to a head this May.
The Democratic Party has high hopes that Talarico can flip a critical Senate seat blue and become the first Democratic senator from Texas in decades. His classroom history complicates that pitch considerably.
On November 13, 2012, Talarico posted to Facebook:
"Today, we finished writing our Obama memoirs."
He explained that students wrote a memoir of Election Night from the point of view of a member of the Obama family. One student excerpt he shared read, "I was crying when my father was giving his speech," followed by praise for "those lovely words that came out of his mouth."
Three days later, on November 16, 2012, Talarico posted again with an image of the classroom display:
"Our Wall of Fame has been updated with our awesome Obama Family Memoirs!"
The display featured more than a dozen memoirs alongside photos of former President Barack Obama and his family. This was not an optional enrichment exercise or a civics lesson exploring multiple perspectives. Sixth graders were asked to inhabit the emotional experience of a Democratic president's family on election night, then their work was celebrated on the wall.
The Obama memoirs were not the only window into Talarico's classroom priorities. Other posts from his teacher account revealed a broader picture:
Notice what these posts have in common. Every politically charged moment pointed in one direction. The "free thinker" wall skewed left. The convention he promoted was Democratic. The memoir assignment venerated a Democratic president. There is no corresponding post asking students to explore Mitt Romney's concession speech or write from the perspective of a Republican family on election night.
That is not teaching. That is formation.
Fox News reports that Corey DeAngelis, a school choice advocate and research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, called the assignment disqualifying for a Senate hopeful in Texas. Conservative commentator Steve Guest posted on X, drawing attention to "what Talarico was doing as an 'educator.'"
The National Republican Senatorial Committee went further:
"James Talarico made his public school students write 'Obama memoirs' and encouraged them to watch the DNC. What else was he telling Texas kids in his classroom?"
It is a fair question. When a teacher's publicly available social media reveals this level of political curation in a sixth-grade classroom, the reasonable assumption is that the posts represent the visible portion of something larger. Most teachers do not document every lesson on Facebook.
Talarico's press secretary JT Ennis issued a statement to Fox News Digital that managed to address nothing specific about the classroom assignments:
"John Cornyn, Ken Paxton, and the billionaires who prop them up are scared of James Talarico for good reason: our campaign is building a movement poised to change the politics of this state and take power back for working people."
Ennis added:
"While they spend their time lobbing stale attacks to mislead Texans, we are uniting the people of Texas to win in November."
Calling it a "stale attack" is a choice. The posts are Talarico's own words, on his own account, describing his own classroom. The campaign did not deny the assignment happened. It did not explain the pedagogical rationale. It did not argue that asking eleven-year-olds to write from the perspective of a president's family is standard curriculum. It simply pivoted to populist boilerplate about billionaires and working people.
When confronted with specific evidence, a campaign that cannot offer a specific defense is a campaign that knows the evidence is a problem.
Parents across the country have spent the last several years fighting to understand what their children are being taught and by whom. School board meetings have erupted over curriculum transparency. The school choice movement has gained ground in state after state precisely because families saw what was happening inside public school classrooms and decided they wanted alternatives.
Talarico's posts are a case study in the kind of ideological capture that fueled that movement. A public school teacher, paid by taxpayers, using his classroom to celebrate one political party's victories and encourage students to emotionally identify with one party's leaders. Not as a critical thinking exercise. Not alongside opposing viewpoints. As celebration, complete with a "Wall of Fame."
Many have also called out Talarico's history of progressive statements, including saying "God is nonbinary" and using the Bible to justify abortion. These are positions a candidate is free to hold. But combined with the classroom record, they paint a portrait of someone whose progressive commitments are not recent conversions for a Senate run. They are deeply embedded, and they were brought into a room full of children who had no choice but to be there.
Texas voters will decide this November whether that record belongs in the United States Senate. At least now they know what was on the wall.