SB 571 is in full effect. Here’s what Texas educators need to know.

More than a year after Gov. Greg Abbott signed SB 571 into law, the pieces of Texas’ new educator misconduct system are now largely in place. What began during the 2025 legislative session as a sweeping rewrite of how schools report and investigate employee misconduct has moved through months of State Board for Educator Certification (SBEC) rulemaking, new reporting requirements, mandatory training, a new enforcement officer, and the formal adoption of rules governing educator discipline and the educator code of ethics. 

For educators, that timeline matters because SB 571 isn’t one change. It created a series of new requirements affecting how allegations are reported, how quickly districts must act, what information follows employees when they change jobs, and when SBEC and TEA can suspend an educator’s certificate before the normal disciplinary process has run its course. Educators have a legal and moral responsibility to protect their students from harm, however the process carries with it potential for educators to be unduly impacted.

We've raised concerns about SB 571 before. There were provisions we supported, particularly extending misconduct reporting requirements beyond certified educators and applying them more consistently to districts, charter schools, private schools, and including other people working with students or on campuses. But we also warned that the legislation lacked sufficient due process protections for educators accused of misconduct. And while the law gives the agency the authority to quickly suspend a certificate, it did not establish required timelines for the completion of investigations. More than a year later, as the law moves from legislation to everyday practice, those concerns have become increasingly important. 

The first major changes actually took effect last summer. Under SB 571’s expanded reporting requirements, principals must now report certain allegations involving employees or service providers to their superintendent within 48 hours (down from seven business days) of becoming aware of evidence of misconduct, and superintendents face a corresponding 48-hour deadline (also down from seven business days) to report covered allegations to TEA or SBEC. The law broadened reportable conduct to include physical mistreatment regardless of bodily injury, inappropriate communications, and failures to maintain appropriate boundaries with students, among other conduct. The latter two factors were only recently defined in SBEC as of June 2026. 

TEA followed that initial guidance with new misconduct training and a required pre-employment affidavit. Applicants for public school employment or service-provider work must disclose certain previous investigations and disciplinary actions, whether they have appeared on the Do Not Hire Registry and certain circumstances surrounding termination or resignation. New employees, along with existing employees who haven’t already received required training, must also receive instruction on recognizing and reporting abuse and maltreatment. 

Then came the enforcement machinery. In February, Commissioner Mike Morath appointed Levi Fuller as TEA’s first Inspector General for Educator Misconduct, a newly created position overseeing the agency’s response to educator misconduct allegations. Fuller works with TEA’s Educator Investigation Division on investigations, certification sanctions, placements on the Do Not Hire Registry, settlements and case closures. 

SB 571 also gave SBEC authority to temporarily suspend an educator’s certificate before a contested case hearing in certain circumstances, including arrests for specified serious offenses or when an educator is determined to pose a continuing and imminent threat to public welfare. A temporary suspension committee has been meeting regularly to process those cases. 

That is where our concern about due process becomes especially important. As we reported following SBEC’s April meeting, the temporary suspension committee had already suspended hundreds of certificates, while the broader reporting system was pulling educators into investigations before allegations had necessarily been substantiated. Removing people who pose a genuine threat to students from classrooms is a good thing. But protecting students shouldn’t conflict with protecting educators’ due process rights. A system can, and should, do both. One year into this implementation, we still have concerns that investigations are not occurring in a timely fashion and that teachers are not seeing their certificates reinstated even after being cleared of the charges that led to the suspension. 

The latest development is the formal adoption of the rules needed to carry out those provisions of the bill. Rules published in the Texas Register in July amend Chapter 249 of the Texas Administrative Code and implement SB 571’s disciplinary procedures, including updated reporting requirements and rules governing temporary suspensions. Texas AFT participated in the rulemaking process and pushed for greater clarity and stronger protections against unwarranted investigations; we were disappointed that TEA chose not to incorporate several comments that would have clarified the rules and better protected educators. 

This rulemaking has happened in the background while TEA has put educator misconduct itself into a much brighter public spotlight. In June, the agency launched its Educator Misconduct Dashboard, which publicly aggregates information on reports submitted to TEA, agency investigations, SBEC disciplinary actions and placements on the Do Not Hire Registry. Users can view allegations by category, including inappropriate student-educator relationships, fraud and other misconduct, along with information about investigations and sanctions. 

In our earlier coverage of its rollout, we welcomed increased transparency and specifically noted the importance of including uncertified teachers in the data. We also said there was room to provide greater context and drill further into what those numbers actually mean. That distinction matters because a misconduct report isn’t the same thing as a finding of misconduct, and raw numbers without sufficient context can blur the line between allegations, investigations, and substantiated violations. Further, since there may be multiple persons required to report, the dashboard may be capturing duplicative information causing an appearance of inflation. 

That concern isn’t hypothetical as Texas educators have already seen how quickly the state’s disciplinary apparatus can become entangled with political controversy. Last year, TEA received roughly 350 complaints related to educators’ alleged comments following the killing of Charlie Kirk. We reported in December that TEA had dismissed 280 of those complaints, an episode that underscored why allegations alone cannot be treated as ironclad evidence of wrongdoing. 

SB 571 was sold as a way to strengthen student protections and ensure serious misconduct doesn’t fall through cracks between districts, employers, and the state. Those are goals educators share. No teacher wants someone who poses a danger to children protected by bureaucratic failures or allowed to quietly move from one school system to another. 

But now that the rules are written, the dashboard is public and TEA’s new enforcement structure is operating, the next test is whether the system can distinguish quickly and fairly between genuine threats to students and educators caught in unsubstantiated or overly broad complaints, especially in this fraught political environment. We will continue monitoring implementation, pushing for due process, and making sure a law intended to protect students doesn’t become a system that assumes educators are guilty before the facts are in and keeps them in employment limbo while waiting for TEA to fulfill its legal obligations.