Thursday, November 21, 2019

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 


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?

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