Plans ramped up for teacher incentive pay
Effort would reward those who do well on district-created, state-approved evaluations
Houston ISD’s top finance official has a warning for the district’s teachers: Don’t bank on any big across-the-board raises in the coming years.
The most sizable pay bumps will come instead from the Teacher Incentive Allotment, a new
Texas initiative that aims to reward educators who score well on district-created and state-approved employee evaluation systems.
“The Teacher Incentive Allotment is really meant to be the primary way that teachers earn more money,” HISD Chief Financial Officer Glenn Reed said.
Faced with that reality, districts across Houston have started kicking their incentive efforts into high gear this school year, with several moving swiftly to grab money that will help with recruitment and retention efforts. Created in 2019 as part of the state’s sweeping school finance overhaul, the program is expected to deliver hundreds of millions of dollars to districts across Texas in the coming years.
Rather than continuing to boost salaries for all teachers — which legislators did in 2019 — state leaders are using the incentive to promote pay-for-performance models and compensate top educators.
Individual teachers who score well under the evaluation systems will earn $3,000 to $32,000 for their school, depending on the educator’s rating and the school’s share of students from lower-income neighborhoods. Most or all of those funds are supposed to end up in teachers’ pockets.
While state rules do not specify how many evaluated educators could or should receive incentive pay, some district officials peg it at no more than one-quarter of teachers.
Supporters of the incentive program, including Education Commissioner Mike Morath and the Texas Legislature’s Republican leadership, say the system will help keep top teachers in the classroom longer and give educators added incentive to work in high-poverty schools.
However, teacher unions and some school leaders oppose performancebased pay models, arguing they fail to accurately measure teacher quality, place too much emphasis on standardized test scores and curb collaboration among educators.
Despite those reservations, many districts throughout Houston are charging ahead with plans to participate.
Two of the region’s largest districts, Aldine and Conroe ISDs, submitted their evaluation plans to the state in April, with the goal of measuring performance starting in the 202122 school year and delivering payouts sometime in 2023. Several other districts are expected to follow suit in the next two years, including Houston, Cy-Fair, Pasadena and Alief ISDs.
“We’re looking for the very best teachers, and as a district, we decided: Why wouldn’t we do this for our teachers?” said Paula Green, Conroe’s director of human resources. “They deserve this, just as other teachers across the state will have an opportunity to participate in it.”
Under state rules, districts joining the initiative must create detailed evaluation systems that include at least two primary components: an observation-based rating and a measure of student academic growth.
Districts can limit who is eligible for the merit pay and decide how to divide up their allotment. However, at least 90 percent of the money generated by each teacher must go toward staff compensation at the campus where they work.
In Aldine, educators’ ratings will be based on scores from the Texas Teacher Evaluation and Support System — a tool commonly used by school administrators to grade teachers’ planning and instructional skills, among other traits — and various student performance metrics. They include standardized test scores and progress on learning goals set at the beginning of the school year.
Aldine officials say the incentive pay will help them overcome challenges with attracting and keeping teachers, many of whom can make similar salaries while working and living in more affluent districts. Nearly half of Aldine teachers have five years of experience or less, compared to roughly 30 percent of the teachers in neighboring Conroe and Humble.
“This could be a gamechanger for us,” Aldine Chief Human Resources Officer Javier Villarreal said.
Conroe ISD is taking a different approach, limiting eligibility to higherneed campuses and simplifying its evaluation system.
The district will only rate educators teaching certain core classes and working in schools where 70-plus percent of students are classified as “economically disadvantaged” by the state. Three-fifths of each teacher’s rating will depend on student growth measured by state standardized test scores or state-sanctioned exams, while the remaining two-fifths is tied to administrator observations.
Houston ISD officials remain in the early stages of planning, with a target of submitting an application to the state by spring 2022. However, the district’s approach could change under a new superintendent, whom school board members are expected to choose later this month. Morath also continues to pursue the board’s ouster due to multiple findings of trustee misconduct and chronically poor academic performance at Wheatley High School, though his effort is stalled amid litigation.
Cy-Fair leaders are following a similar timeline as HISD and starting to form committees to devise an incentive plan, even though Superintendent Mark Henry opposes the concept.
“It’s been my contention all along that the money that’s intended for this Teacher Incentive Allotment ought to be just equally distributed across the state to our teachers. We deserve that,” Henry said.
“But, having said that, the Teacher Incentive Allotment is there and we are going to need to participate because we don’t want to get behind our neighbors, and certainly we don’t want to deny at least a few of our teachers the opportunity to earn that.”
About 80 Texas districts have submitted applications or received approval to date, while more than 500 others have signaled their intent to join, according to the Texas Education Agency. Notable local exceptions include Katy, Galena Park, Spring Branch, Goose Creek and Pearland ISDs.