This Monday Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick released his list of priority bills for the legislative session. While the announcement did not include the actual language for the bills, it did include a few words describing what each bill would do. The five bills pertaining to public education and the five...
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This past Monday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick announced assignments for Texas Senate committees for the 88th legislative session. The 31 Texas senators were each assigned to the 15 standing senate committees and a 16th special committee on redistricting. In order to guarantee compliance with the Texas Constitution, which mandates that...
Read MoreReminder: Take the 2022 Texas AFT Membership Survey by Dec. 9 Last year, our members’ answers in our annual survey helped us change the narrative in Texas and force state leaders to deal with the real issue for our public schools: respect. This year, we need your input as...
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Ahead of the upcoming legislative session, which begins Jan. 10, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has released his 21 legislative priorities, including a number of items related to K-12 and higher education. While the priorities Patrick listed at his Wednesday press conference are mostly “concepts” at this stage, Texas AFT sees...
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Friday, April 19, 2024 This past Tuesday, April 16, the U.S. House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Social Security held a meeting to discuss the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and Government Pension Offset (GPO), two provisions that heavily penalize many Texas educators and public employees. AFT members from across the...
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Last week, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Senate Finance Chair Sen. Joan Huffman (R-Houston) sent an open letter to TRS Board of Trustees Chair Jarvis Hollingsworth asking him to examine the possibility of reducing premiums for Medicare-eligible retirees. Due to the prospective premium decrease, the letter also directed the TRS...
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Last week, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick released his interim charges, outlining the items that Patrick intends for senators to study in preparation for the next legislative session. In our last edition of the Hotline, Texas AFT unpacked each of interim charges that affect K-12 public education. This week, we’re diving...
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Friday, April 12, 2024 Despite recent claims that public education is at a "record high," the real data shows Texas schools are starving. Full Speed Ahead and No Sign of Relief Texans are still reeling from the tornado of bad policy that came out of last year’s record-breaking five legislative...
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This Thursday, April 11, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick dropped a list of 57 charges for senate committees to study in preparation for the 89th legislative session next spring. Nearly a third of the charges he included were either directly or indirectly related to education in Texas, but none of the...
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Earlier this week, Texas AFT released a statement condemning Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) Chairman Aaron Kinsey’s unilateral decision to divest $8.5 billion in Permanent School Fund assets from wealth manager BlackRock, ostensibly in response to 2021’s Senate Bill 13. On March 19, Kinsey issued a formal statement to...
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After facing decades of fierce bipartisan resistance to the idea of using taxpayer dollars to pay for private school tuition, school voucher supporters “in Texas” — more on that in a moment — emerged from the March 5 primary election claiming victory. But should they? Let’s dig deeper into the...
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This past fall, Common Cause Texas, the state affiliate of the national democracy watchdog group, released a report highlighting the outsized influence that a small group of monied donors have on Texas politics, including public education policy. The report, “ALEC-tioneering: Unmasking Money and Influence in Texas Politics,” primarily focuses on...
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