A new statewide poll turned up something Texas politics rarely produces: near-consensus. Asked whether the state should track and publicly report on whether its more than $100 billion a year investment in education and job-training programs actually leads to good-paying jobs, 85% of Texas voters said yes.
The 85% is not a soft majority either: 57%, an outright majority, said they strongly support the idea, another 28% support it somewhat, with only 8% opposed.
Why this matters: the state cannot yet fully connect the dollars to the results
Texas invested an estimated $108 billion in FY2024 in education and workforce programs.¹ While the state collects a great deal of information about those programs, it needs better data and data integration to reliably verify how those investments translate into good jobs and earnings.
Much of the relevant workforce and education information sits in separate, compliance-oriented systems that were built to file reports, not to answer questions about effectiveness and performance across programs and agencies. Currently, a Texas Workforce Commission (TWC) wage record can show that a pharmacy-program graduate is employed and earning, but not answer whether that person is working as a pharmacist, or reliably know where they are performing their job. The state can see that the investment was made; connecting it to actual results is harder than it should be.
A rare, broad consensus
The appetite for closing that gap is not a partisan or regional phenomenon, and that is what makes this result unusual. The question, part of Texas 2036’s 10th Texas Voter Poll conducted by Baselice & Associates and fielded August 22 to 26, 2026, found support barely moved across usual dividing lines. It was 86% among voters who lean Republican, 85% among those who lean Democratic, and 88% among Independents. It ranged from 79% to 89% across the state’s media markets.
Support rose modestly with income, from 81% among households making under $60,000 to 92% among those making $160,000 or more, and also rose modestly with education, from 77% among voters with no college to 91% among those with a postgraduate degree. Across every major demographic group, support ran between roughly 77% and 92%, a level of agreement not frequently observed on a policy question.
In more colloquial terms, Texans of nearly every stripe want to know whether the money the state invests in preparing people for good jobs is performing as intended.
A rare moment to fix it
The good news is that the tool to change this is on the table right now. The Texas Workforce Commission (TWC) and the Texas Workforce Investment Council (TWIC) are under Sunset review, the Legislature’s roughly once-in-a-dozen-years opportunity to examine how a state agency works. The Sunset staff’s own report found that TWC’s data governance “results in permanent data silos.”
Texas 2036, together with a coalition of business, education, and civic partners, filed a comment urging the Commission to go a step further: not only to modernize and integrate these systems, but to require that the resulting data be timely, usable, and appropriately shared with the agencies, colleges, employers, and public who already rely on and need insights from it.
That captures precisely the capability voters just said they want. The poll does not tell the Commission or the Legislature which technical fix to adopt. But the findings do answer a political question that often stalls this kind of reform, which is whether there is real public appetite for measuring results. On that, the answer is clear.
What to watch
Texas has spent several legislative sessions tying its education and workforce dollars to outcomes, from community college funding built on credentials of value to career and technical education aligned with real jobs. Those reforms are only as strong as the data and systems behind them.
The Sunset process and the upcoming Legislative session are the state’s chance to build that foundation, and Texans have now said, by a margin of better than 10-to-one, that they want it. We will be watching the Commission’s decisions closely, and working to help make sure the answer voters asked for is one the state can finally give.
Read more: Texas 2036’s written comment on the TWC and TWIC Sunset staff report; Texas 2036, How Data Modernization Can Support Texas Education and Workforce Growth; and the Sunset Advisory Commission’s staff report on the Texas Workforce Commission and Texas Workforce Investment Council.
¹ Texas 2036 estimate for FY 2024, based on the Texas Education Agency’s Public Education State Funding Transparency report (December 2025), the Legislative Budget Board’s (LBB) Fiscal Size-Up publications for 2024–25 and 2026-27 biennia, 2024-2025 General Appropriations Act, and LBB Legislative Budget Estimates by Program Articles VI to X Fiscal Years 2023 to 2027 (January 2025). The estimate, which includes state, federal, and local funds, covers PK–12 public education ($89.49 billion), higher education ($15.15 billion), and workforce development (estimated $3.3 billion in FY2024 in TWC workforce training and development services, excluding employer-funded Unemployment Insurance and certain ancillary services).
