Merit Pay in Dalls - the Ups and Downs - Marshall Memo 10/2/2023

The Track Record of Merit Pay in Dallas

In this Education Gadfly article, Amber Northern describes the trajectory of the

Accelerating Campus Excellence (ACE) merit pay pilot program launched in 2016 in the

Dallas schools. It followed the implementation of a new performance evaluation process two

years earlier. Here’s what happened:

- High-rated principals could make $13,000 more, assistant principals $11,500 more,

teachers $6-10,000 more, instructional coaches $6,000 more.

- To get the pay increase, educators had to be accepted to work in one of the district’s

lowest-performing campuses, dubbed ACE schools.

- Educators already in those schools had to go through a rigorous screening to keep their

jobs.

- Only 20 percent were retained; the rest (including principals) were assigned elsewhere.

- They were replaced by teachers from the pool of the highest performers.

- Researchers followed data in the initial cohorts of ACE schools, comparing them to a

control group of non-participating schools with similar incoming student performance.

- ACE schools showed an immediate, significant improvement in student achievement,

bringing their math and reading scores close to the district average.

- In the second and third year of the intervention, ACE schools’ scores continued to rise,

showing that the more exposure students had to highly effective educators, the better

they did.

- Test scores in the control group schools flatlined.

- Student achievement gains in the ACE schools were so great that by 2019, three of the

four initial ACE schools no longer qualified for the program.

- As a result, educator stipends were eliminated in those schools, along with after-school

and other programmatic components.

- Over 40 percent of the high-performing teachers transferred out of their ACE schools,

and those who remained were assigned to PD responsibilities outside the classroom.

- The former ACE schools then saw a sharp decline in student achievement, reversing

most of the previous gains.

- Schools in the control group didn’t experience these fluctuations.

What lessons can be drawn from Dallas’s initiative? First, significant pay incentives can

persuade educators to transfer to a low-performing school. Second, reconstituting a school’s

staff can make a dramatic difference. Third, good teaching and school leadership are keys to

student achievement. And finally, if effective teaching and other programmatic elements are

not sustained, everything falls apart.

“The Ups and Downs of Dallas’s Pay-for-Performance Roller Coaster” by Amber Northern in

Education Gadfly, September 28, 2023