FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 6, 2025
CONTACT: Nicole Hill, press@texasaft.org
House Bill 2’s arbitrary $220 basic allotment increase will not make public schools whole again.
Austin, Texas – On Thursday, March 6, 2025, Texas AFT will testify before the Texas House Committee on Public Education regarding House Bill 2, Chairman Brad Buckley’s school finance bill. This hearing comes on the heels of a Tuesday meeting of the committee, where lawmakers heard invited testimony on HB 2 from administrators, educators, and select policy experts. Over the course of the hearing, lawmakers urged witnesses to share the amount they actually need from the basic allotment, which is the base amount of per-student funding that all public school districts receive. The basic allotment has not been increased since 2019, and in the years since inflation has eroded those gains. Chandra Villanueva at Every Texan said it well, telling lawmakers that “this bill does need a lot more money dedicated to it … it would take about $1400 to get there and this bill only has $220.”
Texas AFT has done its homework: Texas must increase the basic allotment by $1,386 just to keep up with inflation since 2019. Texas AFT’s Patty Quinzi and a number of our rank and file members will be at the Capitol to share these concerns in-person with lawmakers today.
“We appreciate that lawmakers have included an increase to the basic allotment in House Bill 2 after six years of stagnation. However, House Bill 2 falls over $1,000 short of what Texas schools need just to keep up with inflation since the last increase in 2019. Without a substantial increase in the basic allotment, we don’t see how schools can be successful given all of the state mandates added since the last increase,” said Patty Quinzi, director of Public Affairs & legislative counsel at Texas AFT. “It is critically important to raise the basic allotment–not only to boost school funding and teacher pay but also to prevent sizable increases in recapture payments if a voucher program becomes available to all Texas children. We’re also disappointed that there has not been more discussion of the loss of $607 million in School Health and Related Services (SHARS) funding for students in special education. We hope to work with lawmakers to address these concerns and more in future versions of the bill.”
Texas AFT has additional concerns about the emphasis in HB 2 and in Senate proposals on the Teacher Incentive Allotment, a pay-for-performance scheme that ties educator pay raises to standardized testing scores and excludes large swaths of the educational workforce from eligibility.
“We live in a state with the world’s eighth-largest economy, and yet this Legislature has not even put in sufficient funding effort to ensure the people who take care of our kids every day earn the national average for teacher pay,” said Texas AFT President Zeph Capo. “The folks who win with these insufficient proposals aren’t teachers or students; they’re the vendors who will get to pad their bottom lines with our tax dollars to administer them. We have teachers streaming out the exits. They need across-the-board pay raises that help them buy homes and support their families, not exclusionary programs that grow administrative bloat at TEA.”
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The Texas American Federation of Teachers represents 66,000 teachers, paraprofessionals, support personnel, and higher-education employees across the state. Texas AFT is affiliated with the 1.8-million-member American Federation of Teachers and the AFL-CIO.