As Fort Worth schools look to improve, could this campus be a model?

One morning last week, 17 kindergartners were sitting in neat rows on a mat in Luz Botello’s classroom at Annie Webb Blanton Elementary School , learning about letters.

“When we see this, what sound do we make?” Botello asked, pointing to a big block letter Z on the screen at the front of the classroom.

“Zzzzzzz,” the kids buzzed.

She handed each student two sheets of paper, one printed with an S and the other with a Z. Then, she walked them through sister words like zeal and seal. Those words can be tricky, she explained, because they’re only one letter apart, and Z and S make similar sounds. She asked them to hold up the paper showing the first sound they heard in the word “zip.”

Tricky or not, most of the students had no trouble figuring it out. Seventeen arms went up, all holding Zs. Several kids buzzed again for emphasis.

Annie Webb Blanton is one of the Dallas Independent School District’s biggest success stories. In 2015, the school was one of the lowest-performing campuses in Texas. But after a sustained effort on the part of school leaders and an infusion of extra resources from the district, the school has seen rapid growth.

The school’s turnaround is one piece of a larger academic ascent in Dallas ISD, which has seen steady gains in student performance over the past decade. It’s a trend that’s gotten attention in Fort Worth, where leaders have grown frustrated with a lack of progress in the city’s largest school district.

Fort Worth ISD seeks new leader, new direction

The Fort Worth Independent School District is a school system in transition. Former Superintendent Angélica Ramsey resigned at the end of September, leaving the district without a single designated leader for about a week. Earlier this month, the school board appointed Karen Molinar, who was serving as deputy superintendent , to act as interim superintendent while the board searches for a new chief.

Ramsey’s departure came about a month after Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker spoke at a school board meeting, calling on board members to help turn the district around. Parker called the district’s performance “unacceptable,” and said a lack of academic gains hampered students’ opportunities in the future.

Parker pointed to academic progress in two other big urban districts — Dallas and Houston ISDs — as examples of what’s possible with an effective leader and a clear strategy. Although she stopped short of calling for Fort Worth ISD’s superintendent to be replaced, Parker said the district had lacked leadership for years.

A look at Fort Worth and Dallas ISDs’ STAAR test scores over the past decade throws the two district’s trajectories into sharp relief. In 2015, the two districts were exactly on par, with 28% of students performing on grade level on the state test. But since then, Dallas ISD has posted steady gains, climbing to 42% of students testing on grade level last year. Meanwhile, Fort Worth ISD’s scores have hovered around where they stood a decade ago. Last year, 29% of students in Fort Worth ISD scored on grade level on the state test, just one point higher than where the district was in 2015.

Blanton Elementary was early ACE campus

Alicia Iwasko, principal at Annie Webb Blanton, said the lively but organized scene in Botello’s classroom stands in stark contrast to how things used to look at the school. When Iwasko came to the school as a math instructional coach in 2015, kids were constantly out of class, either roaming the hallways or hanging around just outside classroom doors. When they were in class, students mostly worked on worksheets and other busy work while teachers sat at their desks, working on their computers, she said. Most of those teachers were brand new, and weren’t prepared to work in a high-need campus like Blanton, she said. Many didn’t even last through the first semester.

Iwasko came to Blanton as a part of the Accelerating Campus Excellence, or ACE, program that then-Superintendent Mike Miles rolled out that same year that flooded struggling campuses with extra resources. The idea behind the program was to offer Dallas ISD’s top-performing teachers extra money to teach at its most struggling schools. The program also includes other elements, like extended school days, an increased focus on math and reading instruction and outreach to parents.

The first thing the new teachers and school leaders did when they arrived at the school was to give it a face lift, Iwasko said. They wanted students to feel like they were getting a fresh start at a new school. The campus got new school colors and a new mascot — the Blanton Bruins — and every wall got a fresh coat of paint, she said.

Campus leaders also worked with teachers on changing the school culture, Iwasko said. She remembers walking down hallways in those early days and greeting students by name, only to have them refuse even to look up. They looked purposeless and defeated, she said, like they were just going from one place to another without any idea why they were there.

It took some months before students started to seem more engaged, she said. One of the biggest breakthroughs came after Thanksgiving break, she said. When students showed up at school and found all their teachers there, some were shocked, she said. Up to that point, so many teachers resigned in the middle of the year that students were used to coming back from breaks to find long-term substitutes teaching their classes.

“That was something that was set for them in their minds, that they were not worthy of having teachers all year round,” she said.

Since Iwasko became principal, she’s tried to create an expectation that students will be greeted by two to three teachers who know them by name. Teachers on morning duty greet families as they drive up and offer a welcome to students who walk to school, she said.

The students at Blanton weren’t the only ones who needed support after the staffing reboot, Iwasko said. The teachers who came to the school during the first year of the ACE program had been effective educators on their old campuses, but coming to a new school and doing the work needed to turn it around was a big change for some. So campus leaders worked with teachers on how to build relationships with students, especially those who were harder to reach.

The results came quickly: From the spring of 2015, just before the staffing change, to the spring of 2018, the school saw a 24-point uptick in the number of third-graders passing the reading section of the state test, climbing from 26% before the change to 50% after it.

‘No silver bullet’ for struggling schools

As important as the ACE program was, it was just one piece of the strategy that helped get Dallas ISD moving in the right direction, said Michael Hinojosa, who served as the district’s superintendent from 2005 to 2011, and again from 2015 to 2022. The program was designed to produce quick results at a handful of high-need schools, he said, not to create the kind of decade-long upward trend in test scores that the district has seen. A big part of that effort came down to building stability in the district and repairing trust with parents and other members of the community, he said.

Through the 1990s, Dallas ISD was mostly known for its chaos. Five superintendents rotated through the district between 1996-2000, including one who went to federal prison after an FBI investigation determined she spent $16,000 in public money on furniture for her personal use. Members of the New Black Panther Party showed up to school board meetings with guns.

“It was like a donnybrook all the time,” Hinojosa said.

When Hinojosa began his first stint as superintendent, many people in Dallas didn’t believe in the district, he said. During those first six years, Hinojosa said, he did “a lot of blocking and tackling” — implementing curriculum, training teachers and developing principals. It wasn’t until he returned for his second stint as superintendent that the work he’d done the first time around was beginning to pay off, he said.

Once the district started to improve, the city took notice, he said. More than 200 companies approached the district about forming partnerships — “ including American Airlines and Southwest Airlines, who don’t like each other,” he said. Those partnerships helped the district expand its science and engineering opportunities and expose students to career pathways they could explore after graduation.

Those industry partners represent one of a handful of groups a superintendent needs to manage, Hinojosa said, and managing them all at once is a key to getting a school district headed in the right direction. The students are the most important piece of the equation, he said, but the school board, community leaders and teachers and staff also play critical roles. Although community leaders like mayors and industry executives don’t have a formal role in the education system, Hinojosa said it’s vital that they be involved.

“To make this all work, it’s got to be comprehensive, and there is no silver bullet,” Hinojosa said.

ACE schools showed fast, temporary gains

In a working paper released last year, a team of researchers working with the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, or CALDER, analyzed Dallas ISD’s student achievement data to gauge how much of an impact the ACE program had, both in the short- and long-term.

Researchers found that those campuses saw big gains in academic achievement immediately after those programs were implemented. Students gained more ground more quickly, and those gains stayed with most students for years after they moved on from elementary school.

“It’s not just a reform that raises test scores, but not learning,” said Steven Rivkin, one of the researchers on the paper. “It’s clearly something that led to substantial improvements.”

But the improvement wasn’t permanent, researchers found. When the district ended the ACE program at those campuses and withdrew the extra support that went with it, test scores fell to about where they were before the program was implemented.

Rivkin, an economics professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said the program did essentially what it was designed to do — it brought the district’s best teachers to some of its lowest-performing schools and gave them extra support once they got there.

But the program was never designed to be sustainable in the long term, Rivkin said. So after a few years in the program, those low-performing schools weren’t performing poorly anymore, and district leaders pulled back that support and shifted it to other campuses that were still struggling. Most of the high-quality teachers who had come to those schools at the beginning of the program left — in many cases, Rivkin said, because the district recruited them for the program’s next cohort of campuses.

Although Dallas ISD’s ACE program didn’t initially lead to lasting gains at those schools, Rivkin said he thinks the model is still worth exploring. While the initial costs of the program may not be sustainable over many years, he suspects there’s a balance to be found between continuing full support for those campuses and withdrawing it entirely. Districts may be able to modify the stipends once campuses are stabilized so that those schools are still an attractive place for high-quality teachers to work, but the program doesn’t cost quite so much for the district to sustain, he said.

State money allows for lasting school support

Miguel Solis, president of the Dallas-based nonprofit Commit Partnership, said it’s critical to look at what happened next in districts like Dallas ISD. In 2019, Texas lawmakers passed House Bill 3, a massive overhaul of the state’s education finance system. Included in the bill was funding to create the Teacher Incentive Allotment, a program that gave districts extra money to create stipends to reward highly effective teachers.

Solis, who served as a Dallas ISD school board member from 2013 to 2020 after working as a teacher and then an administrator in the district, said the program made it possible for Dallas ISD to maintain funding for the ACE program in perpetuity. So campuses that regressed after the district shifted its efforts elsewhere got extra support again, and test scores began to improve again.

Solis, who worked as a special assistant to Miles at the beginning of the ACE program, said districts that want to adopt the ACE model effectively need to have rigorous evaluations in place for teachers and principals. The entire model hinges on putting the most effective educators in front of the students who need them most, he said, so districts need to have a good way to see which teachers are getting the best results.

But like Hinojosa, Solis said the ACE program wasn’t the only factor contributing to Dallas ISD’s academic gains. The district also expanded its pre-K offerings, adding more classes for 3-year-olds and more tuition-based classes for families who don’t qualify for free pre-K. There’s a widespread consensus among education researchers that high-quality pre-K helps close the achievement gap between lower-income students and their peers.

Another big factor in the district’s progress is consistency in leadership, Solis said. When Hinojosa returned for his second stint as Dallas ISD’s superintendent in 2015, he adopted essentially the same strategy that Miles had left him, Solis said. When Hinojosa retired in 2022, Stephanie Elizalde, who had worked as an administrator under both Miles and Hinojosa, stepped into the top job. The district has been working from some version of the same playbook for more than a decade, Solis said, which means teachers and staff haven’t had to adapt to a new strategy with each change in leadership.

“When new superintendents come in, sometimes they’ve got a whole bunch of new things they want to try,” he said. “Hinojosa and Elizalde stuck to that plan, and so did the board.”

FWISD borrowed ACE plan — at smaller scale

Although Dallas ISD was the first district in Texas to adopt the ACE program, Fort Worth ISD followed soon after. Fort Worth called its turnaround schools Leadership Academies, and offered teachers extra stipends to come help those campuses grow. Fort Worth took its program one step further, turning day-to-day operations at those schools over to Texas Wesleyan University under a state law that gives districts extra money to form innovative partnerships with outside organizations like colleges or charter school networks. That funding allows the district to continue the program in perpetuity.

The district has seen results at its Leadership Academies: Within a few years, all moved from failure ratings to As and Bs on the state’s A-F accountability scores. But unlike the initiative in Dallas, Fort Worth ISD’s program is limited to just five campuses. And similar partnerships haven’t been as fruitful. In 2021, the district brought in Phalen Leadership Academies, an Indianapolis-based charter school network, to operate Jacquet Middle School in the Stop Six neighborhood. The district’s board signed on for a five-year partnership with Phalen, but ended it after just two years after Jacquet didn’t show signs of progress.

Likewise, Fort Worth ISD also uses the Teacher Incentive Allotment to give stipends to its most effective teachers. But during the Oct. 22 board meeting, Mohammed Choudhury, the district’s deputy superintendent of learning and leading, said not enough of those top-tier teachers are working where the district needs them most. Some districts assign teachers to the campuses where they need them most, without giving teachers much say in the matter, he said. Fort Worth ISD allows teachers to apply for the schools where they want to work, so the best teachers don’t necessarily end up in the highest-need schools.

Leadership, commitment are key for school turnaround work

A few doors down from Botello’s classroom at Blanton Elementary, Miguel Fijó was talking to his second-graders about punctuation. Fijó teaches bilingual students, and on that morning, they were learning how periods — or puntos — are used in Spanish. They go at the ends of most sentences, he explained, and also after abbreviations like izq., an abbreviation of izquierda, the Spanish word for “left.”

After Fijó went over a few examples, the kids divided into pairs and explained the concept to each other, something education researchers say can help students understand concepts more deeply.

Iwasko, the principal, said teaching skills like the ones on display in Fijó’s classroom are a key part of the school’s turnaround. No matter how bright students are, they can’t learn without good teachers, so it’s school leaders’ responsibility to put the best educators they can find in front of their kids.

But as important as those skills are, there’s another factor that’s even more critical to turning a struggling school around, Iwasko said. Even before it has good teachers, a struggling school needs a strong leadership team, she said. Principals and assistant principals set the values and culture of the campus, create expectations for students and act as instructional leaders for teachers. In any district where leaders are looking to turn a campus around, their first move needs to be putting strong leaders in place, she said.

But the most important thing, she said, is that everyone on the campus must be committed to the work. That’s why, when she hires new teachers, she looks first at whether they’re passionate about educating kids and resilient enough to keep showing up to do it every day — even when it’s hard.

“You can coach the skills. Everybody can learn the skills,” Iwasko said. “But the passion and the heart for teaching, you cannot coach that.”