Evaluation and Pay Reform in Dallas
A large, urban school district in north central Texas, Dallas ISD enrolls roughly 139,000 students in 240 schools. Some 72 percent of students are Hispanic, about 20 percent are Black, and about 6 percent are white. Approximately 90 percent of students are eligible for free or reduced-price school lunch, and the four-year graduation rate is around 80 percent, which is below the statewide average.
Local efforts to change educator evaluation and compensation began in earnest in 2011, after new state rules empowered Texas districts to develop their own ways of rating teacher performance. In Dallas, the district board of trustees adopted a pay-for-performance compensation system proposed and developed by then-Superintendent Mike Miles. Over about three years, the district established a new multiple-measures evaluation system based on classroom observations, growth in student test scores when available, and student surveys.
The evaluations, adopted in 2015 as part of the Teacher Excellence Initiative, or TEI, are based on detailed rubrics defining excellence and on aligned professional development for teachers and principals. A parallel reform for principals, the Principal Excellence Initiative, uses a similar method to assess and categorize principals by performance, including their use of the rich information created by TEI evaluations to help teachers improve. Pay for teachers and principals is based on their evaluation scores averaged over two years. In combination, these structures aim to support educator growth, to strengthen incentives to improve instruction and leadership practices, and to attract and retain strong teachers and school leaders in Dallas ISD.
Teacher evaluations include 10 classroom observations (some unannounced) each year by the same observer, evidence of student progress toward established learning objectives, test-based measures of achievement growth relative to comparable students, and schoolwide achievement. The district also surveys students in grades 3 through 12 each spring and incorporates responses into eligible teachers’ performance ratings.
Each year, teachers receive an evaluation score that is used to assign them to one of nine performance ratings: unsatisfactory, progressing I and II; proficient I, II, and III; and exemplary. Performance-based salaries in the first year of TEI ranged from $45,000 to $90,000, with the largest share of teachers paid $54,000 at the proficient I level. The system maintained fixed proportions of teachers in each performance category; for example, the exemplary category is targeted for teachers in the top 2 percent by evaluation score, while the unsatisfactory rating is targeted for teachers in the bottom 3 percent. A teacher cannot move up or down more than one effectiveness level per year, and a teacher’s salary can only be adjusted downward after they score at a lower level for three consecutive years.
In 2016, the district built on this work through the Accelerating Campus Excellence program, or ACE, which offers up to $10,000 in additional pay for the highest-rated teachers to work in the lowest-performing schools and smaller amounts to teachers rated less effective. ACE teachers also are required to use data-driven instruction and pass ongoing, rigorous screenings to remain in the program, which resulted in the rapid and voluntary reassignment of most ACE educators in a single year.
We assess the impacts of the Dallas ISD reforms by looking at overall student performance data on state tests in math and reading during a four-year period from 2015 to 2019. We conduct a second analysis focused on schools included in the ACE program. We also look at rates of differential teacher retention based on performance ratings and estimate the degree to which a more effective teaching force contributed to changes in student achievement.
Our analyses are based on student enrollment and demographic data; teacher and principal data such as role, experience, salary, education, class size, grade, population served, and subject taught; and student performance on annual statewide tests in grades 3 through 8. Unique student and educator identifiers enable us to follow students and teachers across districts and schools as long as they remain in a Texas public school. We also create a comparison group from elementary and middle schools in the Texas districts with above-median poverty rates.
