Dallas ISD’s teacher force was overwhelmingly deemed effective at their craft nearly a decade ago, even as more than half of graduates left the district unprepared for college. Students’ test scores lagged, and dozens of campuses failed state standards.
DISD leaders, desperate to turn it around, were willing to try new ideas with the hope of rapid improvement.
One in particular — its pay-for-performance teacher evaluation system — is described as integral to the district’s DNA and the bedrock on which all other reforms were built.
The Teacher Excellence Initiative — or TEI — evaluates educators on student achievement that’s largely measured by test scores, classroom observations and student surveys. It replaced a salary scale based on years of experience and college degrees.
TEI comes with a big promise for great educators: You can potentially earn six figures for improving students’ learning.
“It’s a lot of work, but it’s a good incentive,” said Flor Mendez, a teacher who travels to work in Dallas from her home near Forney. She makes $76,000 as a base salary plus more than $20,000 in stipends.
DISD administrators and trustees say they’re pleased with the academic progress made in the years since TEI’s implementation. They’ve used the system to identify which teachers are best and encourage them to go to some of the district’s most struggling schools.
Still, critics rail against the system’s changing complexities, heavy reliance on high-stakes exams and the way talent is distributed. The pay-for-performance model raises equity concerns, pointed out by the district’s own evaluators and explored in a new analysis by The Dallas Morning News.
Knowing which teachers are the best and matching them with the most struggling students is more important than ever to make up for the deep learning losses caused by the pandemic, education experts say.
Children of color from poor communities were hit especially hard by the coronavirus’ disruptions. DISD has pointed to TEI as a way to effectively deploy resources where they are most needed.
The biggest legislative push to help children rebound acknowledges that an excellent teacher makes a difference. A new Texas law calls for students who failed their state tests to receive intensive tutoring or be put in the classrooms of districts’ top educators.
But COVID-19′s disruptions eliminated crucial data sources needed to pinpoint which educators are best because the state halted testing and instruction shifted online, pausing TEI for the past two school years.
So how can a system frozen in time — and already nagged by equity concerns — help Dallas kids recover?
Students missed precious time in the classroom during the pandemic. Results on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness tests reflected that loss. Roughly 4 in 10 DISD third graders failed math and reading exams.
Officials are laser-focused on ensuring that DISD’s more than 140,000 students recover from the pandemic’s educational and emotional tolls.
An equity issue
Dallas ISD officials created TEI in part to help get the best teachers to those most in need, but an analysis by The News found that the distribution of such educators was often uneven.
The district’s magnet schools — which have academic entrance requirements or selective admissions criteria — and campuses with few disadvantaged students were much more likely to have highly rated teachers compared to other schools, The News found based on data from the first years of TEI.
Based on 2018-19 data, the most recent available, 25% of teachers rated across DISD were what the district considers high-performing or “distinguished,” with classifications of proficient II or higher. But at magnet schools and those with fewer poor students, it was 56% of teachers. And at the district’s early college high schools and transformation campuses (which are choice schools with no academic requirements), it was almost 40% of teachers on average.
Dallas ISD officials counter that The News’ analysis of TEI data from the 2018-19 school year is outdated because of COVID-19 disruptions. However, when The News asked for more recent data, district officials declined to provide it, saying that too many teachers have not been rated since then because of the pandemic. They also contend that any conclusions from such data would not be meaningful and that releasing it could violate teachers’ privacy.
The highest-rated teachers are often the ones with students who traditionally test well, said former DISD teacher Kristen DeRocha, who as a TEI Campus Expert was designated by the district to help other teachers understand the complex system.
When DeRocha worked at Dealey Montessori, teachers at the magnet school were regularly rated top in the district. Her colleagues frequently scored high marks based on how well the overall school achieved.
By contrast, DeRocha said this wasn’t the case when she taught at Bryan Adams High — a neighborhood school with more than three times the low-income student population as Dealey.
Leading the pack across Dallas ISD: the vaunted School of Science and Engineering, which consistently ranks among the nation’s best high schools, and Dallas Environmental Science Academy, a West Dallas middle school. Both are magnet schools that admit only high-achieving students. And at both campuses, 88% of teachers with ratings had top TEI marks in 2018-19, the district’s data shows.
At the other extreme, five neighborhood schools — Bryan, Cochran and Polk elementary schools, along with Kennedy-Curry Middle and Madison High — did not have any highly rated teachers that year, the data shows. Both Bryan and Cochran have since joined the district’s Accelerating Campus Excellence, or ACE, program.
Superintendent Michael Hinojosa said the district recognizes this uneven pattern and has developed plans to try to address it.
“It is an equity issue, no doubt about it,” Hinojosa said. “We still want to keep our magnet teachers because they’re great, and I don’t want to lose them to the suburbs. I’m not going to force them to go somewhere else. However, we can incentivize them to go to the other campuses, and some have already started doing that.”
Some of Dallas’ best teachers were indeed placed at the district’s most struggling elementary schools. The district used TEI to identify those educators and then — through the ACE program, along with its “High Priority Campus” initiative — offered large stipends to persuade those teachers to work at chronically under-performing schools.
At Titche Elementary, for instance, the school had no teachers at the top distinguished levels a few years ago. But after entering the turnaround program, that rate soared to 72%, district officials noted. In 2020, Titche was honored as a National Blue Ribbon School for its academic progress.
And Chávez Elementary saw its share of top-rated teachers double, from about 25% to 50%, after becoming an ACE campus.
Still, the biggest concentrations of top teachers were mostly at schools like Dealey and Travis (both magnets), Solar Prep School for Girls (a choice school where by design, only half of students are low-income), and Lakewood Elementary, home to DISD’s most affluent and whitest student body.
DISD’s own evaluations have highlighted the distribution of top-rated educators.
“Teachers at majority white schools had the highest student achievement scores,” reads a 2015-16 TEI report.
Trustees tried to tackle the issue over the years with various tweaks to the system. The biggest changes were presented one month before the pandemic upended much of the district’s work.
Administrators decided to double the number of points available to teachers who work at “high priority” campuses that have historically struggled, giving an additional bump to their TEI score, which could translate into a higher salary.
They also decided to rank teachers at neighborhood schools on a different curve than others, in an effort to ensure that magnet teachers are not filling the highest-rated slots purely based on where they work. The changes will be reflected in the ratings released next fall.
“We have solutions that are in place,” said Robert Abel, DISD’s deputy chief of human capital management. “It’s just we’re waiting for our data to be able to be generated.”
At the meeting where these changes were presented, trustee Dustin Marshall said that it’s human nature for teachers to want to work in an environment that is “as easy to teach in as possible” if they’ll earn the same salary as working in a harder one.
That’s why the district’s stipend system is designed “to combat human nature,” Marshall said.
Justin Henry, then board president, countered, saying teachers who work at magnets are allowed to benefit under a system created by the district. And ultimately, he said, DISD defines what greatness is in an educator.
It’s unclear what difference the pre-pandemic switches will have on equitable teacher distribution, but officials expect it to help over time.
“I don’t apologize for having great teachers in [transformation] and magnet schools, but we need them more in other schools and we were in the process of doing that when the brakes came up” and tests were paused, Hinojosa said. “We’re on a journey. We’ll hit that back up at the end of this year, once we have data, and we’ll see how we modify that for the following year.”
Overall, district officials are pleased with how they perceive TEI has impacted the district.
The number of failing campuses has plummeted from 43 to eight in the time they’ve used TEI to flood ACE schools with great teachers. It’s impossible to isolate TEI as the determining factor in the district’s progress, but Dallas leaders point to more concrete reasons to celebrate.
Hinojosa has pointed to DISD’s teacher turnover rate falling. It still exceeds the state, though the gap between the two has narrowed, according to the most recent state data.
“I believe wholeheartedly in the system,” Hinojosa said. “What convinced me was that we kept our best, highest-performing teachers and the ones that left were not the highest-performing teachers.”
By 2018-19, 93% of teachers who received the lowest possible rating two years earlier had either left DISD or improved their rating.
The average base salary increased roughly $7,000 from 2014-15 to 2019-20, according to state data. Across Texas, the average salary has gone up $6,400 in the same period. DISD says the district increase reflects all teachers, including some staff — such as head football coaches and interventionists — who are not eligible for TEI compensation. They say TEI-eligible teachers’ salaries have seen even steeper increases.
Dallas leaders also say early-career teachers can start earning more pay faster under TEI compared to other districts in the region.
Guadalupe Nava was starting to feel burned out from her human resources job in 2012. She wanted to be a teacher growing up, so she decided to get her certification to work in Dallas ISD.
Coming from the business world, Nava said a pay-for-performance system makes sense to her. Her base salary is over $70,000, and she also gets a stipend for teaching in a high-need school.
“Everyone comes into teaching because they want to help kids,” she said. “That’ll get you in the door. But honestly, for me, I don’t know if I would’ve been here this long if I wasn’t compensated better.”
Few years passed from when the district launched TEI to when the state took notice.
In 2019, legislators approved a historic school finance package, part of which funded a new teacher incentive program that awards highly ranked educators with bonuses to teach at impoverished or rural campuses.
While not an exact replica of Dallas ISD’s compensation program, it codifies elements and creates a permanent funding stream that allows districts across the state to set up their own pay-for-performance models. DISD received $28 million through the program in 2020.
On the curve
By the time former DISD Superintendent Mike Miles took over in 2012, district officials had determined that the calcified teacher pay system that rewarded longevity over results wasn’t getting the job done.
Experience matters less if a teacher with decades under their belt and a teacher with five years show they can get the same outcomes, Miles said.
But the district had depleted much of its savings in recent years. To launch a new compensation system, the district had to limit how many teachers could earn top salaries.
From the start, DISD forced a curve to keep TEI financially sustainable. Hypothetically, if all teachers earned between 90 and 100 points on their scorecard, the teachers who earned 90 would be deemed unsatisfactory.
It became the most controversial, but most important, part of TEI, Miles said.
The model drew criticism from some educators and concerns from researchers interviewed by The News.
“You have to believe that for every excellent teacher, there’s an equally horrible teacher,” said Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, an education professor at Arizona State University who studies teacher evaluation models. “It’s really a numbers game and, in many ways, it’s a manipulation game.”
Beyond concerns over how teachers are scored, some worry TEI focuses too narrowly on high-stakes tests.
A teachers union filed a class-action grievance in 2015, arguing that the merit-based system amounted to a pay cut for many. The group says the district continually changes the rubric for what teachers must achieve to get a pay increase.
Education Commissioner Mike Morath, who as a DISD trustee helped launch TEI, is expected to hear the union’s grievance in November.
In the meantime, district officials are wrestling with how to place as many great educators as possible in front of students who fell most behind. The pandemic, however, complicated data collection.
“TEI has become the language of how we describe teacher effectiveness and teacher quality,” said Suzy Smith, a director in DISD’s human capital management department. “We have been missing a chunk of that language and vocabulary that we use now for the last 18 months or so.”
Note: This article is part of our State of the City project, in which The Dallas Morning News explores the most critical issues facing our communities.
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