Fort Worth ISD needs to improve. Could this plan help teachers step up their game?

As officials in the Fort Worth Independent School District look for ways to improve academic progress, they’re pinning hopes on a new staffing model designed to ensure that more kids get a high-quality teacher.

The model, called Opportunity Culture, is based on the idea of having a few highly effective teachers spend part of the day acting as coaches and mentors for other educators in their building. The district is piloting the model at three campuses this year, with plans to expand if it’s successful.

Although Fort Worth ISD leaders say it’s too early to say how the program is going here, education researchers say it’s shown promise elsewhere.

FWISD pilots strategic staffing model with teacher leaders

Under the staffing model, school leaders designate a few top-performing teachers to act as leaders for small teams of teachers, providing coaching and advice for their teams while continuing to work with their own students. The idea is that by placing the best teachers in peer leader positions, districts can magnify their impact, raising the quality of instruction all students get. It also gives those teachers a way to step into a leadership role — and make more money — without leaving the classroom for an administrator job.

Woodrow Bailey, Fort Worth ISD’s chief of talent management, said the district is piloting the staffing model this year at Hazel Harvey Peace and Westcreek elementary schools and O.D. Wyatt High School. If the test run is successful, district leaders plan to expand the program to six more campuses next year, he said. The district’s eventual goal is to expand the program to every campus, Bailey said, but doing so will take several years.

Each school has a handful of teachers designated to act as so-called multi-classroom leaders, Bailey said. Those master teachers have classes of their own that they teach for part of the day before handing the reins to a teaching assistant. For the rest of the day, the master teachers work with other classes in their team, helping teachers hone their skills or working directly with students, he said.

Those master teachers are selected based on their history of helping students gain ground academically, Bailey said. The district is offering them stipends ranging from $12,000 to $20,000 per year, depending on how many other teachers they’re asked to support, he said.

The money for those stipends generally comes from the campuses’ regular budgets, Bailey said. Where the program has been implemented elsewhere, principals have sometimes cut another support staff position that wasn’t as effective and used the money to pay for the master teacher stipends, he said. The fact that the program doesn’t require districts to cover extra expenses means it’s more sustainable in the long term, he said.

The district just wrapped up its second six-week grading period, and mid-year MAP testing is still months away, so Bailey said the district doesn’t yet have the data to tell how effective the staffing model has been at the three schools where it’s already in place.

Opportunity Culture model puts teachers in leadership role

Stephanie Dean, senior vice president with the education consulting firm Public Impact, said the fact that the model allows teachers to step into leadership roles without walking away from teaching is one of the features of the plan they find most appealing. Public Impact, a North Carolina-based company, developed the Opportunity Culture model and works with school districts looking to implement it, including Fort Worth ISD.

The staffing model can look a number of different ways, depending on how school leaders decide to implement it, Dean said. In some cases, districts use the model Fort Worth ISD is piloting: Master teachers work with their own classes for part of the day, then work with other teachers on their teams for the remainder of the day while a student teacher or teaching assistant continues instruction in the master teacher’s classroom. In other cases, master teachers don’t have classes of their own, but instead spend the day rotating among their team’s classes, giving model lessons and working with students in small groups.

No matter how master teachers’ schedules are arranged, they continue to teach, Dean said. They also don’t take on other work that would otherwise be done by a principal or assistant principal, she said. In particular, master teachers should never be responsible for doing job evaluations for their team members, she said. That way, novice teachers feel like their team leader is on their side and not looking to penalize them when they fall short, she said.

FWISD comes under fire over test scores

Fort Worth ISD’s academic performance has come under increased scrutiny over the past few months following remarks Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker made at a school board meeting in late August. Parker pointed out that the district’s state test scores have been stagnant for about a decade, even as the Dallas and Houston independent school districts have posted gains.

During a school board meeting last month, Mohammed Choudhury, Fort Worth ISD’s deputy superintendent for learning and leading, said that strengthening classroom instruction is one of the most important things the district can do to improve student performance. To do that, Choudhury said, the district needs to focus on helping not only its weakest teachers, but also the ones who are merely average. By offering support and coaching to those middle-of-the-pack educators, the district can raise the level of instruction for everyone, he said.

A pair of studies — one in 2018 focusing on three school districts and another from last year looking at statewide implementation in North Carolina — found that the staffing model led to increased student achievement in some areas, but not across the board. Both studies found a statistically significant uptick in math test scores after districts adopted the model, but little impact in reading.

Ben Backes, an economist with the American Institutes for Research and one of the researchers on the 2018 study, said that the result — greater impact in math than in reading — is part of a larger trend in education research. Generally, any kind of academic intervention tends to make more of a difference in math, he said. He pointed to other research that suggests that having a Teach for America teacher in a classroom tends to lead to greater academic gains in math than in reading.

Although it’s hard to say exactly what’s behind that trend, Backes said it could be related to where students get their instruction in reading versus math. Students are very likely to read with their parents or pick up a book to read on their own outside of school hours, he said, and even those who don’t are surrounded by the written word on labels, ads and billboards. But kids aren’t as likely to do math outside of school or homework assignments. That means that the instruction kids get in class is generally the only way they learn math, so any improvement in math instruction will have a bigger impact.

Conversely, researchers pointed to the same trend to explain the uneven academic effects of the pandemic. Students generally lost more ground in math than in reading, in large part because parents felt better equipped to read with their kids than they did to help them do math problems, researchers said.

Separate research by a team of professors at Texas Tech University found the opposite trend. Three researchers from Texas Tech’s College of Education evaluated district-wide implementation of the strategic staffing model in the Ector County Independent School District and found stronger benefits in reading compared to math. Jessica Gottlieb, one of the researchers on the project, said the evaluation didn’t take differences in impact across subject areas into account, so she couldn’t explain why the results were different.

Ector County ISD, which is based in Odessa, began rolling the program out in 2019. The researchers from Texas Tech performed evaluations of the program over four years, and found it was generally associated with academic gains, Gottlieb said. The program seemed to have the biggest impact among students with limited English proficiency and those who were classified as at risk.

Researchers also learned that it’s important that school leaders protect the time master teachers are supposed to spend working with other teachers. Districts that are looking to implement the plan need to be clear at the beginning about what the master teacher’s job entails and what it doesn’t, and stick to that plan, Gottlieb said. Some participants told researchers that they’d experienced a sort of “administrative creep” — as the program wore on, they were asked to take on responsibilities that an administrator would typically handle, which left them with less time to work with their teams, she said.

Although it isn’t the primary goal of the staffing model, Gottlieb said researchers also found that the move could help districts retain their highest-performing teachers. During interviews, several teacher-leaders told researchers that their new role was their “dream job,” she said.

“They get to be teacher leaders,” Gottlieb said. “They get to mentor and support other teachers while also continuing to teach, which is what they love to do and why they became teachers in the first place.”