An Educator’s Bill of Rights
We are losing educators in droves in Texas schools, from teachers to bus drivers to classroom aides to librarians. Even in higher education, faculty and staff are heading for the exits.
Those losses have a ripple effect, making day-to-day tasks harder for the staff who remain and leaving students without the services and support they need. In a state with the world’s eighth-largest economy, we can afford public schools built to thrive.
Texas AFT and our 66,000 members across the state are developing an Educator’s Bill of Rights, and we’re bringing it to the Legislature in 2025.
Educators have a right to reasonable working conditions
Our Texas Needs Teachers report found that working conditions were even more important than compensation in retaining educators, by an almost 2-to-1 ratio. When the state underfunds local school districts, teachers and all staff are saddled with more and more duties, exacerbating high turnover rates and hiring costs. Ultimately, it’s our students’ academic and emotional well-being that suffers.
| Educators have a right to … | Educator-defined problem | Educator-approved solution |
|---|---|---|
| A defined workday | Undefined workdays mean teachers can work (and are often expected to work) significantly longer hours without any additional pay. | We need a definition in law that a workday is not more than 480 minutes (about 8 hours) per 24-hour period during an educator’s contract period. |
| Time to teach | Educators are expected to perform non-teaching duties and tasks unrelated to student success that lengthen their workdays. | Schools must be funded to a level that they can hire additional teachers and support staff to allow for necessary teacher planning time. |
| Safe schools for both students and staff | Lack of mental health staff, along with overcrowded and loud conditions, create safety issues for both students and staff | Our schools need more mental health support staff and infrastructure investments to reduce noise in gyms and cafeterias. |
| Reasonable teacher-to-student ratios | Overcrowded classrooms are unsafe, cause teachers to leave their profession, and significantly impair student learning. | We must prioritize educator recruitment and retention by funding “Grow Your Own” certification programs to encourage existing support staff to gain their teaching credentials. |
| A significant increase in state funding to align with inflation | The lack of a living wage has led to high turnover of experienced teachers and teaching aides. Students suffer when experienced teachers leave the classroom. | Districts must be funded to offer fair wages and hire enough teachers and aides to alleviate large class sizes, handle discipline issues, and address student mental health challenges. |
Educators have a right to fair wages
Texas teachers earn over $9,000 less than the national average and receive $5,000 less in per-student funding; on average, their inflation-adjusted salaries are 6% lower than they were in 2015, contributing to an educator shortage statewide. In 2022, 70% of Texas AFT members surveyed said they were thinking of quitting, and many support staff are living on poverty-level wages. The same is true of higher education, particularly for adjunct professors.
| Educators have a right to … | Educator-defined problem | Educator-approved solution |
|---|---|---|
| Wages that reflect the worth of their work | Teachers and staff are underpaid for the work that they do. | We need a significant increase to the basic allotment, which has not been increased since 2019 and which contains mechanisms to trigger automatic pay increases for educators. |
| A living wage for support staff | Hourly staff are not currently being compensated with a living wage, with some making at or below federal poverty thresholds. | We must establish either a state- or district-level minimum wage for paraprofessionals and support staff. |
| Fair wages in higher education | Texas higher education is also experiencing staffing shortage, with unfair wages as a major contributing factor. | Significant budgetary investments must be made into the faculty and staff at Texas colleges and universities. |
| Fair compensation across the board | Staff shortages persist due to unfair compensation models. | Districts should be compelled to provide unemployment compensation to bus drivers and cafeteria workers. |
Educators have a right to a secure retirement
Our educator workforce deserves to retire in dignity and security, and we can’t do that on the $2,199 per month the average teacher receives from the Teacher Retirement System of Texas. Texas voters turned out in force in 2023 to support Prop A, the first statewide TRS cost-of-living increase in nearly two decades. But that was a one-time Band-Aid. Texas needs to join almost every other state in making sure its retired educators get annual, automatic pension increases that are tied to inflation.
| Educators have a right to … | Educator-defined problem | Educator-approved solution |
|---|---|---|
| A reliable pension | Retirees’ cost of living goes up every year due to inflation, but their annuities remain stagnant. | Cost-of-living adjustments for TRS pensions should be automatic and tied to inflation. |
Educators have a right to quality childcare
In our 2024 Texas AFT member survey, 45% of educators who needed regular childcare said they had trouble accessing or affording it. Additionally, more than half of Texas counties are considered childcare deserts. This isn’t just a childcare problem — it’s an educator retention problem. If our teachers and school staff can’t find or afford quality childcare for their own kids, how can they stay in the classroom taking care of our students?
| Educators have a right to … | Educator-defined problem | Educator-approved solution |
|---|---|---|
| Affordable childcare | Teachers and school staff lacking childcare often are forced to leave the profession. | Prioritizing affordable childcare and access to pre-K programs will serve as an effective recruitment and retention tool. |
Educators have a right to healthy, safe, and secure working conditions
Safety is a prerequisite for learning. Right now, Texas is failing our students and educators on multiple fronts in providing them with a safe learning and working environment. In Texas AFT’s 2024 member survey, gun violence prevention was ranked as the No. 1 priority out of 11 community and social justice issues. But this back-to-school season, we’ve also seen the other hazards in our schools, with campuses across the state struggling to keep buildings sufficiently cooled in blistering summer heat and districts scraping by with crumbling facilities that have lead in the drinking water and asbestos in the walls.
| Educators have a right to … | Educator-defined problem | Educator-approved solution |
|---|---|---|
| Notice of a reported threat | Teachers are not notified when administrators receive a report of a student making threats | The education code must require administrators to inform all campus teachers after receiving a threat specific to their campus. |
| Healthy classrooms | Consistent HVAC issues and a lack of air-quality standards impair the working and learning environment. Additionally, custodians are often tasked with cleaning far too much space for their time and pay. | Texas should establish statutory or local HVAC/air-quality standards and square footage limits for custodial work. |
| Proper funding for state safety mandates | Unfunded safety mandates mean districts have to use classroom dollars to make up for state neglect. | The state must make up the $861 million safety funding gap for our struggling school districts. |
Educators have a right to academic freedom
Any assault on public education is an assault on our freedom as Texans and on our professional duties in educating the next generation of citizens. Ending classroom censorship by repealing book bans and limitations on classroom instructional materials is vital to fostering critical thinking skills in our students and to retaining caring, dedicated teachers to nurture those skills. The same is true in higher education, where protecting tenure and shared governance ensures Texas colleges and universities can recruit and retain the best and brightest academic minds to open the world to our students.
| Educators have a right to … | Educator-defined problem | Educator-approved solution |
|---|---|---|
| Teach the truth | State-developed curriculum allows little freedom for teachers to respond to student needs, and an emphasis on Christian doctrines alienates many students and staff. | The state should restore local control over how students learn, and we must remove the state as a publisher of instructional materials. |
| Instruct without fear | We have experienced an exodus of faculty amid threats against diversity, equity, and inclusion, and teachers are fearful of losing or having their certificate sanctioned. | The Legislature must restore full tenure rights to Texas faculty in higher education and repeal TEC 28.0022. |
| Shared governance in higher education | Efforts by politicians and activist governing boards to shape the content of university classrooms have disrupted the learning environment and endangered our ability to recruit and retain qualified educators. | We must codify the rights of university faculty to participate in the governance of their campus and to shape the content of their own classrooms. |
| Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) | The manufactured threat of DEI has hurt faculty recruitment efforts and has resulted in lost grant monies for universities. | The state must restore the critical and long-standing student services that helped many first-generation students to thrive on Texas university campuses. |
Educators have a right to meaningful training and development
The Texas Legislature has a disturbing addiction to placing unfunded mandates on our school districts. Most of those then fall on the backs of our educators, through shoddily conceived, burdensome, and unpaid trainings like House Bill 3’s despised reading academies. Educators are professionals; it’s time this state treated them like it by reducing the annual requirements for continuing education and encouraging educators to select professional development opportunities that actually pertain to them and will help them improve their students’ success.
That professional growth also shouldn’t be restricted to classroom teachers; we have dedicated and knowledgeable support staff and paraprofessionals who would be great teachers if given the time, space, and funding to pursue their credentials. That’s what solutions to the educator retention crisis really look like.
| Educators have a right to … | Educator-defined problem | Educator-approved solution |
|---|---|---|
| Choose their own professional development | Teachers are required to take redundant or unnecessary trainings, not the professional development they need. | We should reduce or cycle annual required trainings and allow educators to self-select more continuing education options to best serve their students. |
| Professional growth | We have a certification crisis in Texas where the majority of newly hired teachers are uncertified; this is linked to high turnover rates that cost districts thousands of dollars in recruitment and training. | “Grow your own” funding to help paraprofessionals and support staff to earn their teaching certifications also provides support and incentives to encourage uncertified teachers to become fully certified. |
| Compensation for mentoring | Teachers are often required to mentor new teachers in their lunch or planning periods; these uncompensated duties contribute to burnout among experienced teachers. | This mentorship is important, as would be supplemental pay for mentoring novice teachers. |
Educators have a right to organize
Empowered educators produce engaged students. History consistently shows how unions can raise the bar for all of us. And that includes our children’s teachers and school staff. The working conditions for educators 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 their fellow public employees, firefighters and police officers, 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.
| Educators have a right to … | Educator-defined problem | Educator-approved solution |
|---|---|---|
| Collective bargaining | Teachers and school staff have little say in how public school campuses are run, and we see the payoff in high turnover rates and instability for students. | Repeal the collective bargaining prohibition, allowing educators to have a real voice in their working conditions, which are also students’ learning conditions. |
Educators have a right to democratic representation
The past several years have shown just how brittle the bones of democracy are in Texas, from our gerrymandered legislative districts to elected leaders’ continued witch hunts for mythical voter fraud to the state’s forcible takeover of its largest (B-rated) school district. Our Texas Needs Teachers report highlighted a deep concern among Texas educators about the lack of teacher input into state-level policies such as testing, school funding, licensure (renewal), and evaluation. The only way Texas educators feel they can shape policy right now is by voting with their feet and walking right out of their profession.
| Educators have a right to … | Educator-defined problem | Educator-approved solution |
|---|---|---|
| Democratic representation over their pensions | TRS board seats are appointed by the governor. | TRS board seats should be elected by TRS retirees rather than appointed by the governor. |
| Have a say in how their campus operates | Some districts fail to use campus- and district-level decision-making committees to improve school conditions. This lack of a campus voice is among the reasons cited by teachers who leave the profession. | We should require annual certification by districts that these committees have been assembled and consulted. |
| Democratically elected governance of school districts | Democratically elected school boards are taken over by the state, undermining voters. This is another form of privatization. | The state must repeal legislation that allows for hostile state takeover of districts by an appointed education commissioner. |
Educators have a right to freedom of religion
Our public schools ought to be safe spaces for every Texas child, regardless of their race, socioeconomic background, gender identity, or religious upbringing. Increasingly, state leaders are blurring the lines between church and state, and that includes inside our public school classrooms. Whether it’s through a voucher push that would funnel taxpayer dollars to religious private schools or new state-created curriculum that’s chock full of biblical material, we are enduring an unprecedented, big-money assault on religious freedom in Texas.
Our educators are being put in the unconscionable position of choosing whether to violate their students’ constitutional rights or violate the state’s mandates to force religious instruction upon them.
| Educators have a right to … | Educator-defined problem | Educator-approved solution |
|---|---|---|
| Fully funded public schools | Public, taxpayer dollars should not fund private religious education. | We demand lawmakers prohibit all efforts to use public dollars for private schools. |
| Teach curriculum free from religious indoctrination | State leadership including legislators are pressuring the Texas Education Agency to include religious indoctrination in a new state-developed curriculum. | Lawmakers should remove the financial incentive attached in House Bill 1605 and use it through the Instructional Materials and Technology Allotment. Additionaly, we should repeal the state mandate for open education resources (OER) materials. |
