Miles to Equity: A Guide to Achievement For All

By James Terry and Kurt Hulett

Miles to Equity is a story about revolutionizing the radiational pay system for teachers based on their effectiveness not years of service. How a courageous school superintendent who embarks on the lofty goal of turning around the large, dysfunctional, and embattled independent school district of Dallas. The former Dallas ISD superintendent, Mike Miles, is not a traditional educational leader. With a storied career in the U.S. military, Miles brings with him a unique skill set and perspective to leadership and management of large scale organizations. The book delves into the myriad strategies he employs to turn the mammoth Dallas ISD ship around within three, fast paced years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098353360

James Terry

James Terry’s fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Prize, and his stories have appeared in the Iowa Review, the Georgia Review, Fiction, and elsewhere. Raised in Deming, New Mexico, Terry now resides in Liverpool, England.

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Miles to Equity

©2021, Jim Terry, Kurt E. Hulett

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN: 978-1-09835-335-3

ISBN eBook: 978-1-09835-336-0

Acknowledgements

It is with deep appreciation that we recognize the following individuals for their invaluable contributions to the development of this book including: Ann Smisko, Cecilia Oakely, Charles Glover, Paula Blackmon, Garrett Landry, Elizabeth Kastiel, David McDaniel, Stephanie Elizalde, Ed Sorola, Gilbert Prado, Richard Straggas, Barbara Neal, Kimi Tate, Darlene Williams, Cheryl Wilson, Laura Santos, Kaitlyn Osteen, Deno Harris, Kerri Holt, Sequetta Marks, Donna Zemanek, Annett Bigham, Mike Morath, Jeannine Terry, Jennings Sheffield, and, of course, Mike Miles just to name a few. We thank all of the individuals who took countless hours sitting down with us to discuss this critical topic.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Mike Miles

Chapter 1: The State of Equity in America’s Large Urban School Districts

Chapter 2: Dallas ISD and the Mike Miles Approach

Chapter 3: The Solution Explained: The Data, Outcomes, and the Impact

of the Miles Era and the Dallas ISD Reform Initiative

Chapter 4: The Teacher Excellence Initiative

Chapter 5: The Accelerating Campus Excellence (ACE) Program

Chapter 6: The Next Chapter in Education

Bibliography

Foreword by Mike Miles

Many of the improvements we made in Dallas were some of the foundational changes that have made Dallas Independent School District (ISD) one of the premier urban school districts in the country today. I am proud to say these changes were made while I was steering the ship. The Teacher Excellence Initiative (TEI), for example, is a new DNA for all of Dallas ISD, and that is clearly part and parcel to Dallas’s success. We didn’t get much credit for this when I was there, but we also put in place a very strong early childhood framework that takes several years to bear fruit. Dallas ISD is seeing the results of that institutional investment in this initiative as well.

There is a litany of research on incentive systems and there are things that don’t work and things that do. What was engineered for Dallas was based on all the evidence of the things that can work if they are all put together. It was the comprehensive nature of the design and engagement that made the Dallas model so unique. In Dallas ISD, this was not something that was done to teachers. It was done with teachers. There was a focus group of four hundred teachers who were involved in planning its design. It was piloted on a small scale before it was rolled out. It was rolled out to principals before it was rolled out to teachers, which was a key part of the system’s success. It was not built around paying for just some sort of black-box result. It was built so that people understood the expectations in advance, and if they were met, they were rewarded.

There was also a complete alignment of instructional coaching and professional development activities around the system. It is a three-legged stool. It is defining what is excellence in teaching practices in a clear way that people can observe. It is providing aligned instructional supports and coaching so people can get better in that definition. The most important part is paying teachers and administrators when that occurs.

I think one of the key advantages in Dallas ISD is these are not bonuses that are, for example, Congratulations, you got this result. Here’s a one-time check for Christmas. This is just how raises are given out. It is a complete revolution in how we send signals to our teachers. It is that we value teachers as professionals, but in the same token, we are here to get results—to drive impact for kids. You don’t need to run away from the classroom. It’s not just a one-time bonus. It is the teacher’s pay and it will go up and up and up, significantly and rapidly. That is the way any high performing organization is set up.

If you do an evaluation system but you don’t change compensation then why should I get better on the evaluation system? I might do it because of intrinsic motivation, but otherwise, why do I do it? I actually think though that the far more impactful thing is retention. There’s a big difference for any individual in evaluating whether or not to continue in a profession. If teachers get a five-thousand-dollar raise in a year, that matters. The impact on retention is truly a profound issue. What is revolutionary is that the good teachers stay and continue in the profession.

We are lucky we have so many people loving children and wanting the best for children. We as a species would not have survived if that were not a true statement. Teaching is not for the faint at heart. It isn’t. There’s nothing easy about that job, and just because you love children—while this is a necessary precondition—you have to have the ability in order to teach. Loving children is not the same thing as, I can maintain focus of twenty kids simultaneously on a task.

Encouraging excellent teachers to stay in the classroom, and being clear about what our expectations are for what is excellent, is necessary. It is very clear, and it is clear to anybody who participated in public school as a child, that some teachers perform unbelievably, some teachers perform in the middle, and some teachers are less effective. That’s just the way it is. I think we are lying to ourselves if we give them all the same raise every year. We need to differentiate.

For TEI, this is a conversation you need to have with your teachers. This is something that you do over time in a methodical process. My sense from my interactions with teachers all over the state and, in fact, the data on this is compellingly clear: A differentiated way of passing out raises is extraordinarily popular among teachers. It is the overwhelmingly preferred desired scheme. Everybody is concerned about what is defined as excellence that warrants the raise. Due to this, I think any district that moves in this direction needs to be very methodical about being clear in defining excellence in a way that all of their teachers, or at least the majority of their teachers, agree with the definition. If that’s not done then a system that looks and feels a lot like TEI won’t actually be successful.

TEI is a mixed evaluation system. What the mix should be probably depends on the situation in schools because teaching is a very complicated science. Part of it is looking at how well the students grow. Part of it is observable practices by the teachers and their leadership.

Part of it is what students say about it. They’re sitting there eight hours a day listening to the teacher talk. They’re going to have pretty informed opinions—maybe not down to kindergarten, where everybody loves their teacher, but probably starting with third or fourth graders. The TEI evaluation mix is a good mix and you need to have a system that is multi-measured. It should be nuanced because the art and science of teaching is nuanced. The specific percentages are up for some debate and potentially experimentation.

The system’s approach to driving instructional changes is critical. Any system as large as Dallas ISD and Texas has eight thousand six hundred plus campuses, and trying to ensure, for example, effective reading instruction in all of them is critical and necessary. We are trying to ensure districts around the state have strong early childhood education systems that support families. The work on the high school side to connect high school to post-secondary access is also a goal. These all take system-level solutions.

James Terry