TEA Updates Every Texas Educator Should Know

Aug 25

If you feel like there's more to keep up with this year than usual, you're not imagining it. The 89th Texas Legislature passed one of the more consequential education sessions in recent memory, and Texas Education Agency implementation of that session is now landing on campuses all at once — a major school funding overhaul, a new statewide school choice program, new discipline authority, revised safety rules, new professional learning requirements for K-3 teachers, and a batch of classroom-conduct laws, all converging in the same school year. Add in this year's freshly released accountability ratings, and it's a genuinely dense start to 2026–27.

This is a grounded rundown of what actually changed, what it means for your campus or classroom, and what's still unresolved. It's organized so you can skim to the sections that apply to you rather than reading it as one long policy memo — though if you read straight through, you'll come away with a real picture of the year ahead.

2026 A-F accountability ratings are out — and mostly trending up

TEA released the 2026 A-F accountability ratings on August 14, covering more than 1,200 districts and charter systems and roughly 9,100 campuses statewide. The topline numbers are encouraging: about 85% of rated campuses earned a C or better, considered acceptable performance, and roughly a quarter of districts and campuses improved their letter grade from 2025. About 6% of campuses — 585 schools — improved enough to earn an A after posting lower grades previously, while about 8% landed at D or F.

The district-level picture is where it gets interesting. Houston ISD posted a district-wide B — its second consecutive B — and continued its recovery from the 2023 state takeover, with the number of campuses rated D or F dropping from 120 in 2023 to 13 this year. That said, the improvement wasn't a straight line: HISD had zero F-rated campuses in 2025 and four this year (Benavidez, Foster, Highland Heights, and Mading elementary schools) — worth knowing if your community is asking how the "turnaround" story and this year's new F ratings fit together. Wheatley High School, whose poor performance was the specific trigger for that takeover three years ago, earned its first-ever A rating in 2026. Dallas ISD earned its second straight B, and Northside ISD posted a C. Austin ISD earned a B overall but now faces a real threat of state intervention, since two of its middle schools (Burnet and Webb) posted their fifth consecutive F rating — a threshold that historically triggers closer state scrutiny or a board of managers.

If your campus rating shifted this year, it's worth digging into whether that reflects genuine instructional change, a demographic or enrollment shift, or a methodology adjustment — the accountability system has been the subject of ongoing legal challenges over the past several years, with districts suing over how the ratings are calculated, and those lawsuits have delayed release of ratings in multiple prior years before courts eventually cleared publication. That legal backdrop doesn't change your rating, but it's useful context if you're fielding questions from your board or your community about why the math seems to have moved under everyone's feet at some point in the recent past.

HB 2 reshapes school funding — and it's not just about raises

House Bill 2 delivered an $8.5 billion increase to public school funding, the first major boost after years of essentially flat per-student allotments. For classroom teachers, the headline is real raises — but the amount depends heavily on where you teach. Through the new Teacher Retention Allotment, teachers with 3–4 years of experience get $4,000 in districts with 5,000 or fewer students, or $2,500 in larger districts; teachers with 5+ years get $8,000 in smaller districts or $5,000 in larger ones. First- and second-year teachers don't receive a raise under this allotment. Since most Texas teachers work in districts above the 5,000-student threshold, most classroom teachers will see the lower end of that range rather than the top figure. Districts also gained a $55-per-student increase to the basic allotment for general operating costs, plus a separate $45-per-student Support Staff Retention Allotment aimed at the counselors, librarians, nurses, and other non-administrative staff who don't always show up in headline teacher-pay coverage but who keep a campus running day to day.

Underneath the raise numbers, HB 2 makes several structural changes worth understanding even if they don't show up in your bank account directly.

Special education funding is moving to an individual-needs model. Rather than funding special education based on instructional setting, TEA is implementing what's being called an Intensity of Services model, tying funding to tiers aligned with the actual level of service a given student requires. TEA published implementation guidance on this in April, and if you're in special education leadership or campus administration, this is worth a direct look — 2026-27 is a transition year in which districts report data under both the old and new systems, and the shift changes how staffing and service dollars get justified and tracked.

Teacher certification gets a direct financial incentive — for a specific group. Districts receive a one-time $1,000 payment for teachers who were hired as uncertified first-year teachers in 2022-23 or 2023-24, remained uncertified as of January 1, 2025, and go on to complete required preparation components and earn a standard certificate by the end of 2026-27. There's also reimbursement authority for districts covering certification costs in ten specified Career and Technical Education fields, retroactive to teachers certified on or after September 2025 — good news if you have CTE staff who've been working toward certification and wondering whether the district would help offset the cost.

Teacher vacancy reporting is new. Starting with the 2026-27 school year, districts have to report vacant teaching positions to TEA through a new Texas Student Data System core collection, covering vacancies that occur between September 1 and August 31 annually, with the first submission due in September 2027. If you're in HR or central office, expect this to land as a new recurring data task if it hasn't already been assigned to someone.

The Teacher Incentive Allotment gets a new tier — and more money behind it

If your district participates in the Teacher Incentive Allotment, there's a meaningful change worth knowing about. HB 2 introduces a new "Acknowledged" designation level starting in 2026-27 — roughly the top 50% of Texas teachers by the program's performance measures — sitting below the existing Recognized, Exemplary, and Master designations. Performance standards across designation levels were also updated based on 2025-26 performance data, so a teacher's path to a given designation this year may look somewhat different than it did last year even without a change in their actual performance.

The funding formula behind TIA changed too. Acknowledged designations pay $3,000 to $9,000 depending on campus factors, with higher amounts at the Recognized, Exemplary, and Master levels, plus increased multiplier amounts for the high-needs and rural school factors. Teachers currently holding a Recognized designation through National Board Certification are being moved to a new "Nationally Board Certified" designation with its own funding band, rather than folded into the general Recognized tier. TEA also says the application process itself is being streamlined, with expanded technical support available through your regional Education Service Center. If your district has been on the fence about building out a TIA program, or has one that's stalled, this is a genuinely better year to revisit it than most.

New literacy and numeracy screening requirements are phasing in for K-3

HB 2 also rewrites how early literacy and numeracy get assessed, and the rollout is happening in stages that are easy to misread if you only catch a headline about it. For 2026-27, districts are encouraged but not required to administer board-selected literacy and numeracy instruments — this is an interim, transition year. Kindergarten reading readiness assessment remains mandatory under existing law regardless, using one of two free, commissioner-approved tools (Circle Kindergarten Progress Monitoring or mCLASS Texas). For grades 1 and 2, TPRI/Tejas LEE and mCLASS Texas remain available at no cost, and districts can choose alternatives if they prefer. Universal dyslexia screening continues to be required for kindergarten and first grade this year, unchanged.

The bigger shift lands in 2027-28, when all K-3 students will need to be assessed using only instruments from a state-adopted, commissioner-approved list, with testing frequency increasing to multiple checkpoints across the year — beginning, middle, and end-of-year windows depending on grade level. In other words: 2026-27 is the year to get familiar with the tools and the direction things are heading, not the year everything becomes mandatory. Districts that use this transition year to pilot their instrument choice will likely have an easier 2027-28 than those that wait.

Paired with this is the new Texas Mathematics Academies program, a redesigned professional learning requirement of roughly 30 hours — two in-person days, three asynchronous modules, and ongoing virtual touchpoints with cohort leaders. By 2030-31, every K-3 classroom math teacher, along with principals, assistant principals, math instructional coaches, and math interventionists working at K-3 campuses, will need to complete it; new staff moving into those roles after that point will need to complete it within their first year. The 2026-27 school year is the pilot year, with districts gaining a local implementation option starting in 2027-28. If you're a K-3 math teacher or coach, there's no urgency to complete this immediately, but it's worth knowing it's coming and watching for your district's or ESC's pilot cohort openings if you'd rather get ahead of the eventual requirement than complete it under deadline pressure in a few years.

SB 2 launches Texas's first statewide school choice program

Senate Bill 2 opens Texas's new education savings account program this year, letting eligible families use state funds — $10,474 per student for 2026-27, roughly 85% of per-student public school funding, with up to $30,000 available for students with qualifying disabilities and $2,000 for homeschooling families — toward private school tuition and related educational costs. The program launches with a $1 billion budget that's projected to grow substantially, with some estimates putting it near $4.8 billion by 2030 as enrollment in the program scales up.

Whatever your personal view of the policy, the practical implication for public school leaders is straightforward: enrollment planning. This is the first school year where districts will actually be able to see, rather than project, whether and how much the ESA program shifts local enrollment, and by how much. If your district serves a community with meaningful private-school access nearby, this is worth tracking closely in your enrollment data this fall rather than assuming the impact will be negligible — early real numbers will tell you more than any statewide estimate can.

HB 6 expands schools' discipline authority — with real limits attached

House Bill 6 is one of the more substantial classroom-management changes this session, and it partially reverses discipline protections that were put in place in 2017 and 2019. Under the new law, in-school suspension no longer has a fixed time limit, though principals are required to review any extended ISS placement every ten days rather than leaving it open-ended. Out-of-school suspension remains capped at three days, as it was before — what changed is who it can be used on. The bill allows out-of-school suspension for students below third grade (pre-K through second grade) and for students experiencing homelessness — populations that were previously largely shielded from OSS — specifically in cases of "repeated and significant" classroom disruption or a threat to others' safety. Schools are required to document the disruptive behavior before suspending one of these younger students, so this isn't an unlimited return to earlier discipline norms; there's a documentation bar built in.

The bill also loosens the automatic consequences for first-time vaping violations, allowing schools to respond with something less severe than mandatory alternative education placement, and it gives disciplinary alternative education programs more flexibility to operate remotely — though it's worth noting that remote instruction in these settings has been associated with pandemic-era learning loss in the research cited around this bill, so "more flexible" doesn't necessarily mean "better outcomes" without careful implementation. If your campus handles a meaningful number of ISS or DAEP placements, it's worth getting clear guidance from your district on the new documentation and review requirements before you're navigating a specific case for the first time under the new rules.

The cell phone ban is now in its second year

HB 1481, which restricts personal wireless device use during the instructional day, took effect for the 2025-26 school year and continues now that districts have a full year of implementation behind them. If your campus is still refining enforcement — collection systems, exceptions for documented medical needs, consequences for repeat violations, how substitutes are expected to handle it — this is a good year to look at what other, similar districts landed on rather than reinventing the policy from scratch. A year of real-world data across the state means there's genuinely more to learn from than there was when the law first took effect.

New school safety rules are moving through adoption this year

TEA issued a substantial round of school safety updates in April, with several new or amended rules expected to be formally adopted for the 2026-27 school year. The most relevant for classroom teachers: updated drill requirements under Senate Bill 57 explicitly require that students and staff with disabilities have equal access to safety during required drills and emergency events. If your campus's current drill plan hasn't been reviewed with that specific lens, it's worth raising with your safety coordinator directly rather than assuming it's already been handled centrally.

Beyond drills, TEA introduced a multi-tiered monitoring framework for campuses with a history of safety findings, meant to increase accountability while also providing more technical assistance for campuses working to come into compliance. New rules also address safety provisions specifically for extracurricular activities — covering students, staff, and spectators within multihazard emergency operations plans — and TEA has established authority to assign a conservator to a school system that fails to comply with safety monitoring requirements, which is a meaningfully sharper enforcement tool than existed before. On the reporting side, districts are now required to submit emergency response information, including firearm discoveries and bomb threats, through the state's Sentinel portal, so if your campus hasn't been routing that kind of incident reporting through Sentinel yet, that's a gap worth closing now rather than after an incident occurs.

A few classroom-facing compliance items to have on your radar

A handful of new laws affect what's on your walls and in your daily schedule rather than your lesson plans directly, and they're worth knowing even if your district's legal counsel is the one building formal guidance around them. SB 10 requires public schools to display a durable poster or framed copy of the Ten Commandments, in specific dimensions and wording, in every classroom; the state didn't fund the mandate, so schools must rely on privately donated copies or local resources, and must accept any donated display that meets the law's specifications. The law has been in active federal litigation since shortly after it passed — a district court blocked enforcement in a group of districts in August 2025, a federal appeals court sided with the state in April 2026, and related lawsuits were still working their way through the courts as of this past summer — so check with your district on where your specific campus stands before assuming the requirement is settled either way. SB 11 permits, but doesn't require, a daily period for prayer or reading of religious texts, with parental consent required for student participation; districts decide individually whether to adopt it, and some large districts have already said they won't. SB 12 restricts consideration of race, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation in hiring decisions and bars school-sponsored clubs organized around those categories. SB 13 gives parents and school boards new, more formalized authority to challenge and remove library materials containing content they consider indecent or profane.

These are the kind of items where individual educators shouldn't be figuring out compliance on their own — they genuinely need district-level guidance, since implementation details and legal risk vary by how a given district chooses to apply them, and in SB 10's case, by where the ongoing litigation stands. If you haven't seen a memo or training on any of these yet, it's worth asking your administration directly rather than assuming someone else already has it handled, since the start of the year is exactly when gaps like this tend to surface unexpectedly.

Teacher pay and retirement: steady, with a few real wins

Outside of HB 2's raise money, a few other bills affect educator compensation and benefits worth knowing about, particularly if you're weighing retirement timing or comparing your health coverage options. Senate Bill 1 keeps the state's contribution to the TRS pension trust fund at 8.25% and maintains existing state and employer contributions to TRS-Care, while also directing TRS to produce a report to the Legislative Budget Board and the Governor, due by September 1, 2026, comparing the current defined-benefit pension plan against alternative plan designs; TRS's board reviewed preliminary work on that study at its April 2026 meeting, ahead of the formal report. It's worth watching if you're several years from retirement, since the report could shape future legislative proposals. House Bill 500 puts $369 million toward keeping the average TRS-ActiveCare premium increase below 10% for both FY2026 and FY2027, which is a direct, tangible cost-containment win for active employees on that plan. And House Bill 3126 opened a window — now closed — for entities that left TRS-ActiveCare back in 2022 to rejoin before their standard five-year exclusion period ended; the deadline to take advantage of that early-return option was December 31, 2025, so this is now mainly relevant as background if your district or a nearby one was among those that opted out at the time.

None of this amounts to a major pension overhaul, and there's no new cost-of-living adjustment for current retirees in this session's legislation. But the ActiveCare premium cap in particular is worth knowing about if you've been budgeting around steeper increases.

What changed with STAAR — and what didn't, yet

House Bill 4, which would have replaced STAAR with a shorter, different testing model, died in the regular session after the House and Senate couldn't agree on details like the commissioner's rulemaking authority and whether to keep a mandatory social studies test. But that's not the end of the story: lawmakers passed a separate bill, HB 8, in the special session that followed, and Governor Abbott signed it in September 2025. HB 8 eliminates STAAR for grades 3–8, replacing it with three shorter assessment windows across the year (beginning, middle, and end-of-year), while leaving most high school End-of-Course exams largely in place (English II EOCs are being phased out after the class of 2027). The change doesn't take effect until the 2027-28 school year, so STAAR as you know it is unchanged for 2026-27 — but the replacement is already law, not a maybe. If you were bracing for a testing overhaul on top of everything else this year, the honest version is: not yet, but it's coming, and it's already decided.

The throughline

None of this is exhaustive — TEA rulemaking continues year-round, and several of the items above, particularly special education funding and the safety rule adoption process, are still being finalized in detail as the year goes on. But there's a useful pattern underneath all of it: this is overwhelmingly a funding, structure, and oversight year rather than a curriculum year. The biggest changes are about how money flows, who gets reported to whom, and what authority schools and the state have over discipline and safety — not about what happens minute-to-minute inside your classroom on a given Tuesday. Assessment is unchanged for this specific year even though its replacement is locked in for 2027-28, and most of what's new is either administrative or, in the case of teacher pay and the TIA expansion, genuinely in educators' favor.

That's worth some real relief, even amid a longer list than usual to keep track of. The most useful thing you can do with all of this isn't to memorize every bill number — it's to know which two or three items actually touch your role directly, get clarity from your campus or district on those specifically, and let the rest sit as background awareness for now.

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Stephanie Treadwell