(The Center Square) – State Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, who authored the Texas Senate’s education package, including Texas’ first school choice bill, is countering a claim made by Texas AFT that public schools remain underfunded.
Texas AFT called on the Texas Senate, including Creighton, to pass a House public school funding bill claiming, “educators and staff across the state have been laid off, campuses have been closed and consolidated, and deep budget cuts threatened extracurriculars, academic programs, and the support staff who helped the whole student thrive.”
“State leadership has spent the last two sessions picking winners and losers in education policy, and somehow neighborhood schools never come out on top. I can’t stress this enough: Texas public schools are facing an existential crisis, and we need lawmakers to move with a real sense of urgency,” Texas AFT president Zeph Capo said.
Texas AFT is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers and the AFL-CIO and represents all non-administrative certified and classified public school employees in Texas.
Creighton replied, saying, “after saying they’d be OK forgoing teacher raises in order to kill school choice last session, the Texas AFT is at it again,” offering to correct Capo’s claims with “some actual facts.”
Creighton’s SB 26 includes the “largest investment in teacher pay raises in Texas history – and likely the nation,” he said. He filed the bill earlier this year, which unanimously passed the Senate in February, The Center Square reported.
It allocates nearly $5 billion to implement pay raises for public school teachers and includes incentives for additional pay, liability protection, and other provisions. The $5 billion is “a permanent allotment in the state budget dedicated to teacher salaries,” he said.
An education package filed by state Rep. Brad Buckley, R-Killeen, which includes teacher pay raises, doesn’t include a permanent allotment like the Senate version, Creighton said. “For this reason, we are in negotiations to protect it,” he said. “With these raises and other incentives, teachers will have opportunities to earn more than $100,000 a year.”
Buckley’s HB 2, which would allocate nearly $8 billion for additional classroom funding and teacher pay increases, passed the House in April by a vote of 142-5.
The House’s Teacher Bill of Rights also passed in April, which includes enhanced penalties for public school students who commit violence or make threats of violence, The Center Square reported.
The Texas Teacher Bill of Rights is “a national model for ensuring our educators get the compensation and respect they deserve,” Creighton said.
Among other measures, SB 26 allows public school teachers to enroll their children in their school’s pre-K program, if offered, for free; includes liability protections for educators so they “no longer need to pay an organization for liability insurance;” provides a “teacher preparation program that supports uncertified educators already in the classroom on their path to certification;” expands access and options for those seeking to become teachers, Creighton said. It also expands mechanisms to strengthen the state’s education “workforce, recognizing talent, and ensuring every student has a qualified teacher,” he said.
Ahead of the Texas House passing Creighton’s school choice bill, which Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law on Saturday, Abbott said the legislature was “providing more funding than ever before” for public schools “and a higher teacher pay raise than ever before in the history of our state.”
The roughly $330 billion two-year budgets proposed by the Texas House and Senate allocate roughly $96 billion for public school funding for Texas’ 5.5 million public school K-12 students. The majority, $80 billion, comes from state and local funds, the remainder comes from the federal government.
Average funding per public school student is more than $15,000, nearly double the basic allotment of $6,160, the governor’s office says.
Some claim, pointing to Texas Education Agency data, that when adjusting for inflation, per-student funding is closer to funding levels from roughly a decade ago.
According to a Texas Association of School Business Officials survey, 65% of 190 school districts listed deficit budget/lack of resources as their top problem followed by low or declining enrollment. Roughly 42% of districts surveyed said they are reporting ending fiscal 2024 in a deficit and didn’t anticipate giving raises without help from the legislature. Nearly 63% said they expect to end fiscal 2025 in a deficit; 55.3% said they will need to make budget cuts for fiscal 2026, according to the survey.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has said that school districts are cutting their budgets because they kept spending based on temporary federal COVID-era relief money.
“Many school districts went out and hired people with that money,” Patrick said. “So a lot of the cutbacks that they’re talking about is because they spent the money on ongoing things. Our funding for education is higher than it’s ever been.”
He also points out that from 2019 to 2025, public school enrollment only increased by 100,000 students statewide while state funding “has dwarfed that. We’re spending much, much more money for roughly the same number of students” who were enrolled in public schools five years ago.
