Middle school teacher Lisa Dyer, works with Eighth grader Jessa Reyna, kindergarten student Jaxson Padilla, and eighth grader Zsolt Hernandez from Hawthorne Academy as they paint large, foam block letters, which will be held in the 2025 Fiesta Flambeau Parade. San Antonio ISD was one of the first districts in the area to embrace the state’s merit pay initiative for educators.
Vincent T. Davis/Photo courtesy of Vincent T. Davis
Alamo Heights High School teacher Monica Lopez one day plans to take a job as a school administrator. But for now, a statewide teacher pay incentive program makes it hard for her to want to leave the classroom.
The Teacher Incentive Allotment, or TIA, boosts the salaries of thousands of educators across the state, making Lopez, who was just announced as a finalist in the H-E-B Excellence in Education Awards, feel hopeful for the future of education.
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“With the Teacher Incentive Allotment, admin pay is almost comparable with your stipend to stay (a teacher),” she said. “So, I’m not quite ready to leave the classroom yet.”
Most Bexar County school districts have opted into the TIA program, allowing teachers to make thousands more each year for posting strong student outcomes. TIA has been around since 2019, providing merit-based pay raises to high-performing educators. A new school funding bill — worth $8.5 billion — that passed in 2025 provided the program a financial boost.
Intended to reward teacher excellence across the state, TIA awards teachers ranked highly their district’s scoring rubrics with thousands of dollars in annual bonuses. Districts can designate their educators as Recognized, Exemplary or Master teachers. Educators get paid more as their rating climbs.
On the low end, a “Recognized” teacher can earn $3,000 more than they would otherwise while a “Master” educator can earn an additional $12,000. The state also factors in the type of campus teachers work at and can multiply the bonuses if a TIA teacher works at a school with a higher percentage of low-income students or if the campus is in a more rural area.
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Texas awarded over $481 million in Teacher Incentive Allotment funds to more than 42,000 Texas teachers during the 2024-25 school year, according to June news release from Gov. Greg Abbott.
Most of this money went right into the teachers’ pockets. Districts are required to spend 90% of the state funding they receive on teacher compensation, but they can withhold up to 10% for administrative costs. While the Texas Education Agency oversees the broader program, it is up to each district to determine if a teacher is eligible and how they rank internally.
To participate, districts first submit an application proposing how they want to grade teachers. If accepted, they start collecting evaluation data for eligible educators over the course of an entire year before bonuses go into effect. Texas Tech University reviews and validates this data, which includes notes from classroom observations and metrics showing whether teachers’ students are growing in the classroom.
Recruiting and retaining talent
Alamo Heights ISD is completing its first round of the program after applying in the 2023-24 academic year to participate and spending the following year collecting data. The district’s first payout to teachers will be this spring.
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District officials are also considering approving the addition of the “Enhanced TIA” program, which allows for the state bonuses to be expanded to administrators. Deputy superintendent Jimmie Walker said the small district was initially hesitant to implement the program over concerns about being fair to all teachers.
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But after two years of planning, the district was able to launch the program with all teachers eligible for participation and compensation.
This includes teachers outside of foundational classes like math and reading. Special education teacher Lopez said she worked with administrators to find specialized metrics for showing student growth in her area beyond just standardized testing.
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Northside ISD has also reached this final step in the three-year ramp-up process to actually get teachers their bonuses. The district will officially give teachers their rankings in May before awarding the highest-performing teachers their pay increase in a lump sum for the first time in June.
Northside ISD’s director of leadership development, Nicole Franco, described the steps to evaluate all the teachers and collect relevant data as an “arduous process.”
To measure student growth, school districts have to select what metrics they will use to score teachers when they apply for the program.
Growth data can include evidence that students met their learning objectives, portfolios of student work, standardized testing results, pre- and post-tests and anything else that measures a student’s progress from year to year. On top of that, each teacher must be observed for at least 45 minutes in the classroom.
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TIA across San Antonio’s districts
Along with Alamo Heights and Northside ISDs, other Bexar County districts have already been fully approved to join the program and pay teachers thousands more than they otherwise would have earned.
Participating districts include: Comal, East Central, Edgewood, Harlandale, Judson, Northside, North East, San Antonio, Somerset, South San Antonio and Southwest ISDs. Lackland and Southside ISDs have also successfully applied to the program, according to the TIA website, which means they are now in the data-collection stage before they can begin scoring teachers and boosting their salaries.
In Northside, 62% of teachers are eligible for the program. For the area’s largest district, this means submitting data for over 3,000 teachers to Texas Tech to validate.
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Of that pool, nearly 1,300 have earned a distinction on Northside ISD’s rubric, which uses student results from the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, tests and the NWEA MAP exams to gauge growth, Franco said.
Following the statewide launch of TIA in 2019, San Antonio ISD was one of the first districts to participate in the program, with some teachers getting upgraded salaries in the spring of 2021.
As of March 2026, SAISD has 572 teachers enrolled in the program. The district employed nearly 2,900 teachers as of the 2024-25 academic year.
San Antonio ISD’s TIA teachers include nearly 400 of the highest-ranking and highest-paid “master teachers,” SAISD Deputy Superintendent Shawn Bird said. He noted that this is the largest number of master teachers in the area, and the district’s TIA framework has served as a tool to recruit and retain talented teachers.
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Growing the number of master teachers is an important part of the district’s model for catching up the students who are most behind academically. That’s because the TIA program rewards teachers who help students grow the most, he said.
Even before its participation in TIA, San Antonio ISD had a local master teacher program, which gave a select group of teachers a $15,000 bonus as a reward for their high performance.
When teachers gain a distinction, SAISD officials place a plaque on each of their classroom doors to celebrate the accomplishment and be transparent about what level they have earned.
Unlike San Antonio ISD, Alamo Heights leaders privately notified the 141 teachers — nearly half of the district’s total teaching staff — who received a distinction.
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When asked if visibility created tension between those who were awarded a distinction and those who were not, Bird said he did not believe it did. Instead, he previously saw competition when STAAR testing was the main metric for scoring teachers, which could sideline those without tested subject areas.
Ninety-eight percent of district educators are now eligible to participate in TIA bonuses through SAISD. The two percent excluded do not have a metric for determining student growth, including staff who monitor in-school suspension or computer-based instruction, according to spokesperson Laura Short.
Pointing to the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic for teacher burnout and a “mass exodus” from education, Lopez said new ways to recognize teachers’ accomplishments came at the perfect time.
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“We’ve come a long way from there, and I think that we have a long way to go still. But yes, I’m definitely hopeful and see bright futures for both the profession and the students coming through each of our doors,” Lopez said.