LOCAL
NEEDS
LOCAL
SOLUTIONS
Texas
Partnerships
WITH THE LEADERSHIP ACADEMY NETWORK
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Local Needs, Local Solutions: Texas Partnerships with the Leadership Academy Network
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Fort Worth Independent School District (FWISD) identified and
implemented a model for improving school performance that
resulted in positive student outcomes across five campuses. In
2017, with support from The Rainwater Charitable Foundation,
FWISD implemented the Accelerating Campus Excellence
(ACE) model to address the need for additional support for
five schools struggling with student growth and campus
underperformance relative to state-designated benchmarks. The
four elementary schools selected for the model — John T. White
Elementary, Maude I. Logan Elementary, Como Elementary,
and Mitchell Boulevard Elementary — had been rated F or
Improvement Required (IR) in the Texas accountability system for
between three and six consecutive years. Forest Oak, the only
middle school in the group, had been rated F or IR for seven of
the previous eight years.
With the support of a community partnership and strategic
alignment of leadership for the program, the ACE initiative
yielded notable results. Within a year of implementing the
model, all five schools improved from an F to a B in terms of
student growth.
While the growth from the ACE model was promising, the district
needed additional resources and external support to sustain
progress. One component of the ACE model involved providing
stipends to attract highly effective teachers. Stipends, in part,
compensated teachers for extended school days and intensive
professional development requirements. The campuses also
opened for extended hours and provided additional support
services to students. Expanded teacher duties and increased
operations cost related to extended hours required access to
resources beyond the district’s allocation; seeking new funding
sources to sustain the work became paramount in continuing
the schools’ remarkable turnaround. Later research has
reinforced the importance of these efforts. According to a 2023
study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, “when ACE
stipends are largely eliminated, a substantial fraction of highly
effective teachers leave, and test scores fall."
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1
Morgan, A. J., Nguyen, M., Hanushek, E. A., Ost, B., & Rivkin, S. G. (2023, March). Attracting and retaining highly effective educators in hard
to-staff schools (Working Paper 31051). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w3105
w31051.pdf
Everybody Grows
WITH THE
LEADERSHIP
ACADEMY
NETWORK
LOCAL
NEEDS
LOCAL
SOLUTIONS
Texas
Partnerships
WITH THE LEADERSHIP ACADEMY NETWORK
C A S E
STUDY