The Houston Chronicle chose to use the "Total Pay" for each teacher rather than "base pay" for a couple of reasons: 1) by including supplemental pay, we hope to show a more accurate picture of the actual amount of money each teacher takes home each year within a district, and 2) our prior work with this data has shown that there are reporting inconsistencies between districts in terms of how they code elements like stipends and allowances in their PEIMS reports. These coding differences have resulted in stipends being listed under the "basepay" category for some districts, and "other supplemental pay" for others. By using the "total pay" variable, we hope to better account for both scenarios.

Though there is a verification process and a correction period for districts to fix errors in the data before it is finalized, the Chronicle has still found reporting errors in the staffing data. Therefore, we have taken several measures to flag data that may have been in error, either because it seems too high or low or because it has changed drastically year-over-year within a district. Rather than filter these potential errors out, we have flagged them to give readers more context while still being able to access the most recent data available for their district. Salaries that have been flagged as outliers are not necessarily inaccurate, but rather fall outside the expected range relative to other data within the same group.

We used the following definitions for outliers:

Teacher-level outliers: The Chronicle used a interquartile range calculation to determine the middle 50% of salaries for all teachers in the state within each of the following years of experience ranges.

If a specific teacher's salary fell more than 1.5 times above the 75th percentile or below the 25th percentile, it was flagged as an outlier in the data.

District-level outliers: Districts have been flagged if they meet any of the following criteria due to the impact these issues may have on producing an accurate average pay calculation: