Appeals exhausted, Teacher Data Reports to go public

After nearly two years in which the UFT used every legal recourse at its disposal to fight it, Teacher Data Reports will be turned over to several New York City newspapers, TV and radio stations that demanded them under the Freedom of Information Act.

The New York State Court of Appeals — the state’s highest court — refused on Feb. 14 to hear the union’s appeal of a lower court decision, effectively ending the appellate process and allowing for the release of the reports to the public in the coming weeks.

“The Teacher Data Reports are based on bad data and an unproven methodology with a huge margin of error,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew said. “They are not an accurate reflection of the work of any teacher and their release would be particularly inappropriate in view of the fact that the Department of Education has already announced that they will be discontinued and replaced with a statewide program.”

The reports, which assign performance rankings to some 12,000 4th- to 8th-grade ELA and math teachers based on their students’ test scores, lost most of their credibility after the union presented extensive evidence that they are inaccurate and unreliable. The Department of Education itself announced in September that it would stop producing them. Most education experts view them with extreme caution.

Here is how the New York Teacher covered the fight against releasing the controversial Teacher Data Reports. Even Chancellor Dennis Walcott has expressed worry about the potential harmful effects of releasing the reports. “I don’t want our teachers stereotyped,” he told reporters in September. “I have a responsibility to make sure that we protect our workforce… because they’re working their butts off to do their job.” The DOE, responding to the court decision, took pains to remind the public that the released reports will be almost two years old and are “just one indicator of teacher effectiveness and do not tell the whole story.”

Nevertheless, under former chancellor Joel Klein the DOE took the news media’s side against the city’s teachers and argued the case all the way to the state’s highest court.

The reports will be turned over in “a couple of weeks,” school officials said. The UFT is planning boroughwide information sessions, outreach to parent and community groups and individual assistance to any teachers whose report may cause harm [see sidebar].

The principals union has also asked its members to stand with their teachers and denounce the release of the reports as damaging, not helpful.

Teacher Data Reports rank teachers from 0 to 100 with a complex and controversial “value-added” formula based on students’ test scores from one year to the next. The “mark” a teacher receives — which is actually a percentile ranking — typically has an error margin of more than 50 points.