Dallas ISD pays teachers of wealthy & White students even more under TEI!

Testimony being given at monthly Dallas ISD Board Meeting on 11-21-19:

Data clearly shows that Dallas ISD pays teachers of more wealthy & White students significantly higher annual salaries than all other schools! This difference has increased significantly since the start of TEI, the teacher value-added evaluation method called Teacher Excellence Initiative.

Following an open records request, the average teacher salary per DISD school for the three years 2015/16, 2016/17, and 2017/18 was received. (It is linked below in Googledocs.)

In 2015/16 there were 19 schools with economically disabled student percentages below 70%. The difference between those 19 schools and the remaining 216 with higher levels of poverty was $423 in 2015/16.  By 2017/18, after several years of TEI, this difference had exploded over 9-fold to $3,953!

Obviously teacher salaries are growing much faster in the schools with below 70% of students living in poverty, and growing more slowly in the most poverty stricken schools.

(Please join with me in studying the average teacher salaries in each school. The new data for 2018/19 was available by August. I simply have not had time to check. - BB)

More details about this study can be seen by studying the data received from Dallas ISD and found in Googledocs at 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1y4vYXOKkDHkBmval2AP6Eal5KiugVNiYPn037u--Bfs/edit#gid=154474520

Another study on this data was done focusing on the three WHITEST schools in DISD, Lakewood & Mockingbird Elementary, and Travis Middle School, with over 50% White-non-Hispanic enrollment. The average teacher salary in these three schools had gone up from 2015/16 to 2017/18 an average of $9,607. This has resulted in average teacher salaries that are over $11,200 higher than the average of all the other schools in DISD. The average school in DISD only had an average teacher salary increase 2015/16 to 2017/18 of $2,099.

Tragically, this study shows that the school with a significantly higher School Effectiveness Indices (SEI) had salary increases that were half those of the mostly White schools.  

Here is the definition of SEI from the Dallas ISD Data Portal: "School Effectiveness Indices are Dallas ISD's value-added measure of the academic performance of a school's students. The SEI model is an alternative to evaluating school performance with absolute measures such as passing rates. SEIs are a fairer method for determining a school's effect on student performance because they take into consideration known factors over which school personnel have no control, such as socio-economic status, language proficiency, and gender."

How can DISD claim that they are focusing more resources on the most needy students?

Dallas ISD History did not start in 2013/14! 10-24-19 DMN Editorial pretends it did.

Dallas Morning News published an editorial 10-24-18 titled "Is Dallas ISD letting bad, old-school politics creep back in?"  

The erroneous 10-24-19 Dallas Morning News editorial ignored much of DISD History. The 43 Improvement Required (IR or failing) schools in 2013/14 were high poverty & suffered from under-funding. In 2013/14 they were receiving $887 less Regular Funding per student than the ten schools with 50% or more non-poverty (more White) students.  Here is the chart with the average Regular Funding per the more wealthy (White) schools:

Here is a chart with the higher poverty schools that all went IR or failing:

By 2017/18 there were only 4 IR schools. There is also a more equitable funding district-wide.

Obviously there are many additional reasons for this progress, but greater equity is the largest one that nobody is talking about, and it is still not fully corrected. These two charts point to the 2013/14 funding inequity.

The chart below points to the phenomenal progress made in Dallas ISD leading up to 2013.  This progress turned around dramatically in 2013/14 due to new leadership and the massive supplantation of need-based funding, taking Regular Funding away from high need, high poverty schools by a new superintendent.

It is not an accident that when a federal complaint about this 2013/14 supplantation was filed by 15 Dallas ISD residents, and covered heavily on the evening Channel 8 News the evening of 6-3-15, that Superintendent Mike Miles announced his resignation within 3 weeks, on 6-23-15.

A letter from the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) dated September 22, 2017 documents the 15 allegations, none of which were invalidated as the investigation was closed by new DOE leadership. That 9 page letter is posted at  http://billbetzen.blogspot.com/2018/04/government-response-to-4-21-15.html .