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Middle school teacher Lisa Dyer, works with Eighth grader Jessa Reyna,\u00a0kindergarten 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.<\/p>\n
Vincent T. Davis\/Photo courtesy of Vincent T. Davis<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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The Teacher Incentive Allotment, or TIA<\/a>, 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,\u00a0feel hopeful for the future of education.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cWith the Teacher Incentive Allotment, admin pay is almost comparable with your stipend to stay (a teacher),\u201d she said. \u201cSo, I\u2019m not quite ready to leave the classroom yet.\u201d<\/p>\n Most Bexar County school districts have opted into the TIA program,\u00a0allowing 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\u00a0\u2014 worth $8.5 billion\u00a0\u2014 that passed in 2025 provided the program a financial boost.<\/a><\/p>\n Intended to reward teacher excellence across the state, TIA awards teachers ranked highly their district\u2019s scoring rubrics\u00a0with thousands of dollars in annual bonuses. Districts can designate their educators\u00a0as Recognized, Exemplary or Master teachers. Educators get paid more as their rating climbs.<\/p>\n On the low end, a \u201cRecognized\u201d teacher can earn $3,000 more than they would otherwise while a \u201cMaster\u201d educator can earn an additional $12,000<\/a>. The state also factors in the type of campus teachers work at and can multiply the bonuses if a\u00a0TIA teacher works at a school\u00a0with a higher percentage of low-income students or if the campus is in a more rural area.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n 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\u00a0June news release from Gov. Greg Abbott<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Most of this money went right into the teachers\u2019 pockets.\u00a0Districts are required to spend 90% of the state funding they receive on teacher compensation, but they can withhold up to 10% for administrative costs.\u00a0While the Texas Education Agency oversees the broader program, it is up to each\u00a0district to determine if a teacher is eligible and how they rank internally.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0before bonuses go into effect. Texas Tech University reviews and validates this data, which includes notes from classroom observations and metrics showing whether teachers\u2019 students are growing in the classroom.<\/p>\n Recruiting and retaining talent<\/p>\n 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\u2019s first payout to teachers will be this spring.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n District officials are also considering approving the addition of the \u201cEnhanced TIA\u201d 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\u00a0teachers.<\/p>\n RELATED: How is Texas trying to fix its teaching pipeline?<\/a><\/p>\n But after two years of planning, the district was able to launch the program with all teachers eligible for participation and compensation.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Northside\u00a0ISD 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.<\/p>\n Northside ISD\u2019s director of leadership development, Nicole Franco, described the steps to evaluate\u00a0all the teachers and collect relevant data\u00a0as an \u201carduous process.\u201d<\/p>\n To measure student growth, school districts have to select what metrics they will use to score teachers when they apply for the program.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s progress from year to year. On top of that, each teacher must be observed for at least 45 minutes in the classroom.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n TIA across San Antonio\u2019s districts\u00a0<\/p>\n Along with Alamo Heights and Northside ISDs, other Bexar County districts have already been fully approved to join the program\u00a0and pay teachers thousands more than they otherwise would have earned.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0the TIA website,<\/a> which means they are now in the data-collection stage before they can begin scoring teachers and boosting their salaries.\u00a0<\/p>\n In\u00a0Northside, 62% of teachers are eligible for the program. For the area\u2019s largest district, this means submitting data for over 3,000 teachers to Texas Tech to validate.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Of that pool, nearly 1,300 have earned a distinction on Northside ISD\u2019s rubric,\u00a0which uses student results from the\u00a0State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or\u00a0STAAR, tests<\/a> and the NWEA MAP exams to gauge growth, Franco said.<\/p>\n