Some Dallas schools regress after leaving ACE turnaround program
Campuses unable to maintain gains after losing funding, staff
After three straight years of remarkable academic growth at Billy Earl Dade Middle School, the long-struggling Dallas ISD campus tumbled back to the bottom of the district in 2018-19.
Dade’s fall came after its principal received a promotion, more than half of its teaching staff left and Dallas leaders pulled money spent on the campus through the district’s school turnaround program, Accelerating Campus Excellence, ACE for short.
“It was amazing, really storybook for me,” Edward Turner, a longtime south Dallas education advocate, said of the initial results. “But at the end of the day, it’s about how are we going to sustain these programs and provide equitable resources to these schools.”
Dade and six other chronically low-rated Dallas schools mostly sparkled during their three years under ACE, with test scores rising and student discipline rates falling. In turn, state lawmakers and education leaders heralded Dal
las’ model as evidence that all students from poverty can perform at high levels when taught by strong educators in well-funded schools.
An analysis of academic and staffing data, however, shows the first schools weaned off ACE investments posted mixed results in 2018-19, their first year without the added support. The outcomes suggest districts attempting to mimic Dallas’ much-lauded success — including Aldine ISD and eight others already implementing similar initiatives — could struggle to maintain high performance without consistent funding or tweaks to the model.
While three of Dallas’ initial ACE schools maintained relatively strong academic performance, three campuses received D or F grades under the state’s academic accountability system and grappled with significant staff turnover. Dallas invested nearly $1 million per year in some of its first ACE campuses, part of which paid for financial incentives given to high-performing educators.
“We saw some great things happening from the first year out of ACE, and we saw some hard lessons for us,” said Shatara Stokes, Dallas’ director of school leadership over the initiative. “Fundamentally, the thought was we had made tons and tons of progress, so the expectation was that they were going to be able to sustain.”
Dallas officials said they already are taking those lessons — such as establishing clear exit criteria for campuses and maintaining consistent school leadership — and applying them to other ACE schools. District leaders announced in January that they plan to roll the six original ACE campuses back into the program in 2020-21, relying on a projected $28 million in additional funding from last year’s landmark school finance reform package.
To better support programs like ACE, state lawmakers implemented a funding mechanism designed to reward districts that employ highly-rated educators — as measured by evaluation rubrics relying in part on student performance data — in their highest-poverty campuses. The model awards up to $32,000 for the highest-rated teachers working in the most impoverished campuses.
Houston ISD launched a school turnaround model known as Achieve 180 in 2017-18, but the district offered smaller teacher pay incentives than Dallas and did not mandate extensive staff overhauls. Houston allocated more money than Dallas for its initiative — about $15 million to $20 million per year — but spread the funds over roughly 40 to 50 schools annually.
Students in HISD’s Achieve 180 schools have shown above-average gains on state standardized tests compared to their peers throughout the district and state. However, test scores and discipline rates have improved significantly more at Dallas’ ACE schools than HISD’s Achieve 180 campuses.
The ACE story
Few initiatives have driven statewide education policy over the past five years as much as ACE.
First introduced by Dallas leaders in 2015, the model called for ousting nearly all employees at low-rated campuses and replacing them with staff rated highly on the district’s educator evaluation tools.
To entice well-regarded employees to move to highstress schools, Dallas officials offered $6,000 to $15,000 in additional salary per year. District leaders also extended the school day, offered additional non-academic supports and refurbished campus facilities, among other changes.
The results were immediate and remarkable for the first group of seven campuses. Six met state academic standards in 2016 after falling short the previous year, while rates of inand out-of-school suspension plummeted by 66 percent. Praise rolled in from district leaders, community advocates and state policymakers. “With the right support, all students can perform at high levels,” Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath, who served on Dallas’ school board from 2011 to 2015, said in an emailed statement last month in response to questions for this story. “What happened in Dallas ISD when ACE schools first launched illustrates that this is true.”
Dallas officials added four more campuses to the initiative in 2017, posting strong results in the following school year. Under the state’s new A-through-F academic accountability system, one campus received an A, five scored B’s, four earned C’s and a single school failed.
Dallas leaders targeted six more schools for ACE in 2018-19, but the district could only afford the addition by cutting funds from the initial group of seven campuses. One original ACE school, Thomas Edison Middle Learning Center, closed in 2018.
As a result, Dallas officials largely removed staff financial incentives from the first ACE campuses, eliminated the extra hour of class each day and pulled most non-academic supports headed into 2018-19. District leaders also promoted principals leading five of the six campuses, replacing most of them with assistant principals working at each school.
Some success, failure
Three schools survived or thrived following the changes. Annie Webb Blanton Elementary narrowly missed out on an A rating from the state, despite losing its principal and nearly half of its teaching staff. Umphrey Lee Elementary scored a B and Sarah Zumwalt Middle maintained a C, both reporting relatively modest teacher turnover rates of just over 25 percent.
Stephanie McCloud, who was promoted from assistant principal to principal at Umphrey Lee in 2018, said she lobbied teachers to stay on campus despite the removal of salary incentives, emphasizing the strong campus culture built under ACE.
“We wanted to make sure they felt valued, they were listened to, that they still had a say-so in the school,” McCloud said.
Three other schools, however, rapidly regressed without ACE funding. Dade and Elisha M. Pease Elementary School received D ratings after losing half of their teachers from the prior year, while Roger Q. Mills Elementary School failed after its principal and twothirds of its teachers departed.
“New teachers came in, and you didn’t have the same leadership and guidance and discipline that had been set for all those years,” Turner said. “As a community member, I didn’t like it because I knew if (ACE) became inconsistent, the school had the opportunity to become unstable.”
Stokes said Dallas leaders learned three key lessons for schools leaving ACE: install strong replacement principals familiar with their school communities, provide experienced supervisors to principals and extend supports beyond three years if needed.
In Aldine ISD, which installed an ACE-like system at two elementary schools this year, Superintendent LaTonya Goffney said district officials have benefited from Dallas’ experience.
“It’s important for us to demonstrate what’s possible for students from poverty,” Goffney said. “I strongly believe ZIP code shouldn’t control destiny.”
Garrett Landry, who helps districts implement the ACE model as director of the Best In Class Coalition, a melding of two Dallas-area nonprofits, said results from Dallas’ first six campuses illustrate the promise and challenge of the initiative.
“It’s not some silver bullet program that you can just say, ‘We’re going to do ACE,’ and it will be successful,” Landry said. “It’s hard, hard work. It’s a lot of intentionality and fidelity in implementation. And I think, without question, schools need additional funding.”