Aug. 29, 2025: Labor Day

This coming Monday is Labor Day, an annual recognition of union memberswho make up the American labor movement and who have worked tirelessly over decades to build a fairer, safer, and better country forall.

This year, we feel a profound sense of urgency around that continued, collective work. Whether we work in schools, colleges, or universities, Texas AFT members show up every day to serve our communities. With a new school year started, we do so with incredible uncertainty, anxiety, and precarity, amid attacks on nearly everycore tenet of our Educator's Bill of Rights.

All workers - including all public schoolemployees and higher education faculty and staff - deserve fair pay, safe working conditions, affordable health care, and the freedom to retire with dignity. No matter our job, ZIP code, or background.

The surest way to achieve those things is by organizing and joining unions; the 2023 median household income was on average $12,000 higher in high-union-density states than low-union-density states. Notably, states with higher rates of unionization spend substantially moreper pupil in education than low-union-density states.

We deservefully funded public schools that are safe, welcoming, relevant, and engaging.

We deserve accessible, affordable higher education free from political intrusion.

And we deserve the right to join unions, so we can achieve an economy that rewards work, not just wealth, and a democracy where every voice is heard.

More than deserve it, actually.At events across the country and across Texas - from Houstonto Dallas and El Pasoto Lufkin - we will demand these things.

Find an event near you: https://go.aft.org/labordayaction.

Empowered educators produce engaged students. History consistently shows how unions can raise the bar for all of us. That is acutely true of our children's teachers and school staff whose working conditions 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 that firefighters and police officers, their fellow public employees, already have codified in Texas state law.

It'stime for Texas educators to have the right to collectively bargain so we can finally achieve a public education system that works for every Texan.

The second special session call was a rinse and repeat of Gov. Greg Abbott's priorities for Texas, including entertaining a bill to "eliminate the STAAR test." While that phrase might earn lots of hearts on social media, the reality of what transpiredin the Legislature over the last week paints a more troubling picture of the future of assessment and accountability in Texas.

Senate Bill (SB) 8 was the vehicle for the testing and accountability overhaul in the first special session. Filed by Sen. Paul Bettencourt, the bill attemptedto begin where House and Senate negotiations broke down over House Bill (HB) 4, the stakeholder-supported testing bill from the regular session. The 60-page bill was filed on Monday, Aug. 4, and, by the following Tuesday, was reported engrossed by the Senate. By then, Texas House Democrats had broken quorum and that version never received a hearing in the House. In the second special session, the bill (now SB 9) was filed, referred, heard, and voted out of committee all on the same day, Aug. 15, giving advocates zero time to consider and take actionon the bill.

Also in the second special session, HB 8 was filed in the House by ChairmanBrad Buckley and experienced a similar meteoric trajectory. The House Public Education Committee took up the bill last Thursday, Aug. 21, the same week that the majority of Texas school districts were heading back to campus to begin their cellphone-free school year.

1. systems have until Sept. 1 to ensure compliance with the new faculty senate and shared governance provisions
2. the rest of the bill takes effect on Jan. 1, 2026

Many university and college boards meet quarterly, often in February, May, August, and November, making their most recent meetings their last opportunity to make changes to their faculty senates.

Long-time corporate supporter Horace Mann is kicking off back to school with a celebration for educators! From now through Sept. 5, they're giving away over $65,000 in prizes to help teachers feel ready, set and inspired for the school year.

• $25,000 classroom makeover grand prize
• $250 gift cards
• $1,500 school celebrations
• Weekly $50 coffee gift cards

Start the school year with something exciting - enter today!

SM-X01087 (July 25)

1 in 4 Texas school districts sign up for new Bible-infused curriculum. More than 300 Texas school districts and charter schools have signaled plans to use a state-developed reading and language arts curriculum that attracted national attention last year for its heavy references to the Bible and Christianity, according to data obtained by The Texas Tribune. (The Texas Tribune, Aug. 28)