Publish Date: August 30, 2025 5:31 pm Author: Texas AFT
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Friday, August 29, 2025
This coming Monday is Labor Day, an annual recognition of union members who make up the American labor movement and who have worked tirelessly over decades to build a fairer, safer, and better country for all.
This year, we feel a profound sense of urgency around that continued, collective work. Whether we work in schools, colleges, or universities, Texas AFT members show up every day to serve our communities. With a new school year started, we do so with incredible uncertainty, anxiety, and precarity, amid attacks on nearly every core tenet of our Educator’s Bill of Rights.
All workers – including all public school employees and higher education faculty and staff – deserve fair pay, safe working conditions, affordable health care, and the freedom to retire with dignity. No matter our job, ZIP code, or background.
We deserve fully funded public schools that are safe, welcoming, relevant, and engaging.
We deserve accessible, affordable higher education free from political intrusion.
And we deserve the right to join unions, so we can achieve an economy that rewards work, not just wealth, and a democracy where every voice is heard.
More than deserve it, actually. At events across the country and across Texas – from Houston to DallasandEl Paso to Lufkin– we will demand these things.
Empowered educators produce engaged students. History consistently shows how unions can raise the bar for all of us. That is acutely true of our children’s teachers and school staff whose working conditions are children’s learning conditions. If educators have a voice in their workplace, free from fear of retaliation, they can negotiate and win better working and learning environments — the same right that firefighters and police officers, their fellow public employees, already have codified in Texas state law.
It’s time for Texas educators to have the right to collectively bargain so we can finally achieve a public education system that works for every Texan.
This summer, RGV AFT members in Hidalgo ISD organized and won raises for teachers, certified staff, and hourly employees, above and beyond what was guaranteed by House Bill 2 from the 89th Legislature.
For the “union babies” in your life, we’ve added some brand-new merch at store.texasaft.org! Pick up our new onesie – or another tank top, T-shirt, koozie, or sticker – today. All purchases act as a donation to Texas AFT COPE, our union’s political fund. All items are made in America and union-printed in Austin.
The second special session call was a rinse and repeat of Gov. Greg Abbott’s priorities for Texas, including entertaining a bill to “eliminate the STAAR test.” While that phrase might earn lots of hearts on social media, the reality of what transpired in the Legislature over the last week paints a more troubling picture of the future of assessment and accountability in Texas.
Senate Bill (SB) 8 was the vehicle for the testing and accountability overhaul in the first special session. Filed by Sen. Paul Bettencourt, the bill attempted to begin where House and Senate negotiations broke down over House Bill (HB) 4, the stakeholder-supported testing bill from the regular session. The 60-page bill was filed on Monday, Aug. 4, and, by the following Tuesday, was reported engrossed by the Senate. By then, Texas House Democrats had broken quorum and that version never received a hearing in the House. In the second special session, the bill (now SB 9) was filed, referred, heard, and voted out of committee all on the same day, Aug. 15, giving advocates zero time to consider and take action on the bill.
Also in the second special session, HB 8 was filed in the House by Chairman Brad Buckley and experienced a similar meteoric trajectory. The House Public Education Committee took up the bill last Thursday, Aug. 21, the same week that the majority of Texas school districts were heading back to campus to begin their cellphone-free school year.
After Senate Bill 37 was signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott on June 20, university and community college leaders were given only two months to completely restructure long-standing faculty senates. SB 37 has two implementation deadlines:
systems have until Sept. 1 to ensure compliance with the new faculty senate and shared governance provisions
the rest of the bill takes effect on Jan. 1, 2026
Many university and college boards meet quarterly, often in February, May, August, and November, making their most recent meetings their last opportunity to make changes to their faculty senates.
The Texas Legislature failed to act on meaningful workplace improvements for our paraprofessionals and support staff (PSRPs) in the 89th Legislature, allowing bills that would have addressed the working conditions of custodians (House Bill 1573) or established a minimum wage requirement for bus drivers (HB 419) to wither on the vine. Meanwhile, other states have enacted – or at least have urged – many such improvements.
Long-time corporate supporter Horace Mann is kicking off back to school with a celebration for educators! From now through Sept. 5, they’re giving away over $65,000 in prizes to help teachers feel ready, set and inspired for the school year.
$25,000 classroom makeover grand prize
$250 gift cards
$1,500 school celebrations
Weekly $50 coffee gift cards
Start the school year with something exciting — enter today!
SM-X01087 (July 25)
Recommended Reading
Education news from around the state and nation that’s worth your time.
📖 1 in 4 Texas school districts sign up for new Bible-infused curriculum. More than 300 Texas school districts and charter schools have signaled plans to use a state-developed reading and language arts curriculum that attracted national attention last year for its heavy references to the Bible and Christianity, according to data obtained by The Texas Tribune. (The Texas Tribune, Aug. 28)
📖 Teachers are spending more and more on school supplies. Here’s why. While covering the cost of classroom supplies is a challenge educators face annually, the burden on them has grown as the price of many learning materials has jumped by 20 percent in roughly five years. (The 19th, Aug. 27)
📖 An Uncertain Future for HSIs. Hispanic-serving institutions find themselves in a precarious position after news broke Friday that the Department of Justice won’t defend them from a recent lawsuit. The lawsuit deemed the HSI program “unconstitutional” and “discriminatory” for requiring institutions to enroll at least 25 percent Hispanic students to qualify for specific federal grants. (Inside Higher Ed, Aug. 26)
📖 The Lege’s ‘Big Government Intrusion’ into University Academics. Expanding on last session’s anti-DEI campus crackdown, some Republicans in the Legislature are now going after gender and ethnic studies programs and faculty independence. (Texas Observer, April 24)
🎧 The Shocking Billionaire Plot to Dismantle Public Education. Texas is on the verge of passing a law that could defund public education. Vouchers send public taxpayer dollars to private schools. It could cost taxpayers $10 billion by 2030. And it could destroy Friday Night Lights. (More Perfect Union, April 22)
This Education Department Official Lost His Job. Here’s What He Says Is at Risk. Fewer teachers. Incomplete data. Delays in addressing problems and getting financial aid information. Those are just some of the impacts Jason Cottrell, who worked as a data collector at the Department of Education for nine and a half years before being laid off along with more than a thousand other agency employees, warns the Trump Administration’s massive cuts to the department’s funding and workforce could have on the country’s education system. (Time, July 18)
This Education Department Official Lost His Job. Here’s What He Says Is at Risk. Fewer teachers. Incomplete data. Delays in addressing problems and getting financial aid information. Those are just some of the impacts Jason Cottrell, who worked as a data collector at the Department of Education for nine and a half years before being laid off along with more than a thousand other agency employees, warns the Trump Administration’s massive cuts to the department’s funding and workforce could have on the country’s education system. (Time, July 18)
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