New Texas teacher pay bill proposes increasing certain salaries by as much as $10,000

The chair of the Texas Senate Education Committee has outlined his vision for boosting teacher salaries, with a focus on retaining experienced educators.

Sen. Brandon Creighton (R-Conroe) filed Senate Bill 26 on Tuesday, a couple of weeks after Gov. Greg Abbott named raising teacher pay as one of seven emergency items for the 89th Legislature.

Creighton’s nearly $5 billion bill proposes, among other things, pay bumps for teachers who have been in the classroom for at least three years. He said while Texas offers fairly competitive salaries for new teachers, it falls behind other states when it comes to compensating experienced ones.

“Nationally, we rank 15th in the country for starting salaries for teachers,” he told KUT. “But we rank right around 40th for how we pay our experienced teachers.”

According to data from the TEA, the average salary for a Texas teacher was $62,474 during the 2023-24 school year. That figure puts Texas thousands of dollars behind the national average. During the last school year, the average salary for a teacher in the U.S. was an estimated $71,699, according to the National Education Association, which tracks teacher salaries nationwide.

SB 26 seeks to create a teacher retention allotment that would provide raises based on the size of a school district and years of experience. Creighton said the benefit of creating a separate bucket for these dollars is that it will allow lawmakers in future legislative sessions to determine whether the allotment has enough funding.

“It will be specifically for teachers and retaining them because we know if we can keep them past that 60-month mark, we’ve got a really strong percentage chance of having those best-of-the-best teachers remain in the profession,” he said.

According to the 2024 Texas Teacher Poll from the Charles Butt Foundation, 78 percent of teachers have considered leaving the classroom – 20 points higher than what respondents said in 2020. The same poll found 77 percent of teachers said they are not paid a living wage.

Is a new allotment the most equitable way to increase teacher pay? 

Under Creighton’s bill, in a school district with 5,000 or fewer students, teachers with between three and five years of experience would get a $5,000 raise. Teachers with five or more years of experience would get $10,000. In larger districts, those pay increases are $2,500 for teachers in that three- to five-year range and $5,500 for teachers with at least five years of experience.

Pamela McPeters, director of governmental relations for the Texas Classroom Teachers Association, said her group is pleased with the across-the-board raises.

“We believe, especially for experienced teachers, that the salary increase of $5,500 to $10,000 will be significant enough to really help offset inflationary increases that we’ve seen over the last several years,” she said.

But others are not sure if creating a teacher retention allotment is the right route to boost pay.

Brandon Enos is the superintendent of Cushing ISD, a small school district rural in East Texas. He is also chair of the legislative committee for the Texas Rural Education Association. While Enos said teachers definitely need raises, he would prefer to see lawmakers increase the minimum amount the state must spend per student, formally known as the basic allotment.

This building block of the Texas school finance system gives districts more flexibility in determining spending – and the vast majority of what they spend money on is personnel. Enos also noted current law requires districts to spend at least 30 percent of any increase to the basic allotment on teacher compensation.

“So that would increase their pay,” he told KUT, “but it would also allow us to keep the lights on, pay for the inflationary costs that we have because we haven’t seen an increase in per-pupil funding in Texas since 2019, although we’ve had 21 percent inflation across the board.”

Creighton said, with the introduction of the teacher retention allotment, he also wants to remove the 30 percent compensation requirement on the basic allotment.

“We’re going to uncouple some of the rigid requirements on the basic allotment so that school districts can do what they need to do,” he said.

Still, Enos said if public schools don’t get more money to keep up with rising costs, teacher raises won’t be enough to take pressure off strained district budgets.

“If we don’t do something for the cost of running schools also, then it won’t matter if we’re paying teachers more – we’re going to have to downsize,” he said.

Similar to Enos, Chandra Kring Villanueva said she is concerned about creating a new allotment for teacher raises, rather than increasing the basic allotment. She is the director of policy and advocacy at Every Texan, a progressive group. She said offering across-the-board raises does not take into account the specifics of each school district.

“All of our school districts are very unique in their challenges, their needs, their financial situations,” she told KUT. “So this is not the most equitable way to offer teacher pay raises.”

Villanueva said another issue her group has with SB 26 is that it limits the raises to teachers.

“It does leave out everyone else that helps run a school,” she said. “We’re talking counselors, librarians, nurses, cafeteria staff, bus drivers, janitors.”

According to Creighton, while the Texas Senate is more focused on creating specific school funding buckets for teacher pay raises – and other priorities, like special education – he expects the Texas House will propose an increase to the basic allotment.

“We’ll come together on the differences of those budgets just after Easter and we’ll reconcile those probably with a blend of priorities,” he said.

SB 26 expands merit pay program and access to free pre-K 

In addition to establishing a new allotment for teacher pay, SB 26 also aims to expand a merit pay program that gives bonuses to top-performing teachers. Abbott has called for the Legislature to invest an additional $750 million into the state’s Teacher Incentive Allotment. About 49 percent of the state’s 1,200 school districts participate in the program, according to the TEA.

Creighton said his legislation expands the percentage of teachers who are eligible to be part of the bonus program if their school district participates. As currently structured, about a third of a district’s teachers can qualify.

“This (SB 26) would take the framework to 50 percent of the teachers in the district,” he told KUT. “And we also provide supports for districts that maybe don’t have the staff and the administrative offices to launch or start the program itself.”

The bill also states that districts that participate in teacher incentive allotment cannot have a compensation plan that includes “across-the-board salary increases for instructional staff except for periodic changes to the district’s or school’s salary schedule to adjust for significant inflation.”

McPeters, with TCTA, said investing in this performance-based program should not be a top priority as it has gotten harder and harder to keep certified teachers in the classroom.

“We truly believe priority one needs to be ensuring the profession as a whole is well-compensated and not directed toward a bonus program where a teacher may have a chance to have a better salary and that is only if their district participates,” she said.

Zeph Capo, president of the Texas American Federation of Teachers, also said he wants lawmakers to ensure teacher salaries are on par with the national average before directing more funding to a merit-pay program. One thing he does like in SB 26, though, is that it makes pre-kindergarten free for teachers’ children.

“We’ve heard from many of our members that they would be willing to come back to work if they had appropriate care for their young children,” he said. “So I think that’s definitely a benefit and we hope that’s something that passes.”

Creighton, who also authored legislation the Texas Senate has already passed to allow families to use taxpayer funds to pay for private schools, said SB 26 is just one of the bills he is going to file with the goal of benefiting teachers.

“We’ll also have bills on discipline, on truancy, on different frameworks for administrators and school boards,” he said.

A hearing on the bill is scheduled for today.

This story was produced as part of the Austin Monitor’s reporting partnership with KUT.

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