The amount Valere Public Schools Superintendent Salvador Cavazos was paid to run a small charter school network that serves fewer than 1,000 students in three Texas cities. Cavazos’ salary is listed around $300,000 in the publicly posted records that are supposed to provide transparency to taxpayers, because Valere excludes most of his bonuses from its reports to the state. 

The eye-popping compensation previews larger transparency and accountability challenges that could follow as Texas moves to approve a voucher-like program that would allow the use of public funds for private schools. State lawmakers have filed legislation that would cap public school superintendents’ annual salaries, but most bills would not restrict bonuses or apply to private schools that receive public funds. 

Cavazos declined an interview for our story; the Valere school board defended his compensation in a statement saying, “We believe that the benefits that Dr. Cavazos brings to Valere through his vast experience and knowledge justify the compensation that the Board has and continues to award him.” 

“Without exaggeration, every imaginable implementation of this at HUD appears dangerous and inefficient.”

— Excerpt from a memo written and circulated by a member of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in response to a proposed project in which the office of Community Planning and Development would use blockchain to track the funding going to a single grant recipient and possibly subrecipients. HUD has no difficulty tracking grant spending, the memo contended, making the new technology unnecessary.

The proposal is part of wider conversations about using cryptocurrency to pay for government grants. “The department has no plans for blockchain or stablecoin,” HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett told ProPublica. “Education is not implementation.”