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A Dallas teachers group that says DISD’s merit-based evaluation system amounts to pay cuts for many has asked the Texas Supreme Court to force the state’s education commissioner to rehear the group’s grievance.
The appeal, filed Thursday, is the latest move by the National Education Association-Dallas to fight portions of the Teacher Excellence Initiative, or TEI, which bases salary largely on how well students perform on state tests.
NEA-Dallas officials contend that teachers who did not receive salary bumps based on their evaluation “scorecard” essentially suffered pay cuts because the costs of health insurance went up. And teachers don’t know what their salary will be until after the start of a new school year because of the lag time in evaluating STAAR data released at the end of the spring semester.
NEA-Dallas president Delna Bryan said that TEI doesn’t work for the vast majority of teachers and that the district keeps changing the rubric for what measures have to be achieved in order to receive pay increases. She said the system makes it difficult for educators at low-performing schools to reach higher pay levels because their students struggle the most.
“We’re not afraid of being held accountable,” she said. “We’re not afraid of being evaluated. But when you evaluate us, do not tie our salary to scores that you know and you can manipulate each summer to suit you. And we wind up losing money.”
The teachers group says the lag in when the scorecards are released violates interpretations of state law that requires teachers to be notified of pay reductions no less than 45 days before the start of the school year so they can make other employment plans if they choose.
NEA-Dallas also argues that using the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness tests violates state law that requires districts to evaluate teachers on the basis of “observable, job-related duties.”
Dallas school officials continue to defend TEI, saying the system helps them identify and keep the best teachers by offering financial incentives.
Superintendent Michael Hinojosa recently told The Dallas Morning News that he supports TEI now more than ever. He said more than 1,200 of about 10,000 teachers in DISD earn more than $70,000.
“And we’re keeping 95% of our highest-performing teachers,” he said.
Cynthia Wilson, chief of human capital management for DISD, said in response to the appeal that the district has not reduced anyone’s salary. All teachers received at least a 2% raise when the budget was approved this summer, she said.
Officials have made changes to TEI over the years to continue improving it, Wilson said.
“We don’t anticipate that we will have to make any revision to TEI,” Wilson said. “We feel we are on solid footing.”
Lawmakers pointed to Dallas’ pay-for-performance system as a model and approved funneling extra money to districts who use a system that pays the best teachers more.
Officials from the Texas Education Agency, which Education Commissioner Mike Morath oversees, declined to comment because the case is a pending legal matter.
NEA-Dallas filed a class action grievance with the district in 2015 over the system. That grievance was denied by the district and then Morath. A state district court in Austin upheld Morath’s decision. The Third Court of Appeals also upheld his ruling in part, saying the teachers’ grievance was not filed within 10 days of first learning of the switch to TEI in May 2014.
But the teachers group argues that it was not possible for teachers to know that the evaluation system could cut their take-home pay until after the first scorecards were issued more than a year later.
At each Dallas school board meeting, dozens of teachers typically fill the room and speak out against TEI, saying the complex system — which has changed several times over the years — makes inequities in the district worse as educators in high-poverty schools are less likely to hit performance targets that could mean larger salaries.
Some teachers have said they expected salary increases when estimates showed they would outperform their previous scores only to find out the score needed to progress changed.
As the district has altered the evaluation system, various earning levels have collapsed and DISD has changed how educators land on the bell curve-like distribution under the plan. Officials have said changes have been made to help simplify the complex system and to give more teachers the chance to earn higher salaries.
Hinojosa said this week that the district was going to present updated statistics on TEI soon to counter the pushback the district has received from the educators.
Dallas’ teacher turnover rate went from 21.2% in 2015, the first year of TEI’s implementation, to 19.1 last school year, according to the Texas Education Agency. That was higher than the state average of 16.5%.