Texas Classroom Teachers Association

When the 81st session of the Texas Legislature concluded, Texas public schools had a new accountability system for the first time in a decade and educators were among the few in the current economy to receive a pay increase. Issues such as these are invariably touched by many, but of the state's 31 senators and 150 representatives, some were shining stars in working for Texas teachers and students. The Texas Classroom Teachers Association is proud to have worked with these elected leaders, and we dedicate "Legislative Stars" or grant "Honorable Mention" status to the following legislators, who managed to rise to the tasks before them in a session where education was clearly not the focus.

Rep. Mike Villarreal (D-San Antonio)

When the House of Representatives took up the state budget, TCTA and the other teacher associations asked Villarreal to run with an amendment to the teacher incentive pay provisions in the bill. As the bill came out of committee, $97 million per year had to be spent on the Texas Educator Excellence Grant, or TEEG, a campus-based incentive program under which 75 percent had to be paid to teachers on the basis of "objective measures of student performance" (essentially, TAKS scores). Our objective was to free up as much of the incentive pay funding as possible to be used for incentives other than merit pay based on test scores, such as paying experienced teachers to mentor new teachers and to attract experienced teachers to hard-to-staff schools. Villarreal successfully proposed an amendment that would have eliminated any required percentage of the incentive pay money to be spent on the basis of so-called "objective measures" while protecting incentive pay programs that were already in place. While the complete elimination of the required percentage was removed from the final bill, Villarreal’s efforts resulted in the elimination of the TEEG program altogether, and provided negotiators with bargaining power to retain the teacher pay raise in the final state budget and school finance bill.