A Forever Gift
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America's School Trust Library
Architectural plan view of the Counting House — a banking-hall interior with a teller counter, ledger desks behind it, and a small vault recess at the rear. Hand-drafted in oxidized navy ink on parchment.

Texas financial profile

Statehood Without the Federal Floor (cohort 2) · No federal trust (state-derived)

Substrate v1.3 · Last reviewed 2026-05-01 · Read the state dossier

State-derived: no federal admission grant

Texas entered the Union without a federal school-land grant — either because it predated the federal land-grant template (the Original 13) or because it was admitted under a different model (annexation by treaty, cession from a parent state, statehood from a sovereign republic). Counting House measures the federal-trust architecture; for Texas that architecture was never built. The state's own school-finance instruments (general appropriations, local property tax, in some cases a state-derived endowment) live elsewhere in the library.

Permanent fund corpus

$60,600,000,000 Not applicable

As of 2025-08-31

Most recent distribution

Not applicable

Federal grant acreage

Not applicable

Transparency status

No federal trust to disclose

State-derived: never received a federal admission grant, so there is no federal-trust corpus to publish. (The state may still have its own state-derived fund or other school-finance instruments.)

Governance form

Classification: No federal trust (state-derived)

Commissioner of the General Land Office (statewide elected, four-year term — currently Dawn Buckingham, elected November 2022); School Land Board (three members: GLO Commissioner plus two gubernatorial appointees confirmed by the Senate); 15-member elected State Board of Education (representing 15 single-member districts statewide).

Blue vertical bar chart titled 'Market Value of Permanent School Fund' showing the Texas PSF growing from approximately $19 billion in 2001 to about $57 billion in FY 2024, with a step-change after 2018.
Market value of the Texas Permanent School Fund, 2001-2024 (billions of dollars). The largest school endowment in the United States; corpus crossed $50 billion in FY 2020 and reached approximately $57 billion by FY 2024, with a 7.31 percent total weighted return that year. Source: Advocates for School Trust Lands , Texas — Advocates for School Trust Lands (Tonia Day, FY 2024). Reproduced for the library by permission.