Mulgrew Says The UFT Will Help Teachers Defamed By TDR Reports To Personally Sue The DOE

This is the letter I received this morning from Michael Mulgrew:

Dear Colleagues,

As you well know, the war on teachers has been ugly this school year. The ‘blame the teacher’ crowd has frustrated and angered all of us with their divisive and hateful rhetoric. But despite the relentless attacks, you have continued to do what you do best, which is work hard every day to make a difference in children’s lives. When we enter a classroom, we do whatever we possibly can to help those in our care achieve great things.

We still face many challenges ahead; challenges that will test our resolve and require us all to stand and fight together, as we always have.

One of those challenges is upon us now for the 12,000 4th through 8th grade English and math teachers who have been part of the Teacher Data Initiative and received Teacher Data Reports (TDRs).

The Teacher Data Initiative is a pilot program to design a tool (TDRs) to assist teachers in their classroom work — a report meant only for them. But now, as a result of several Freedom of Information Law requests, the DOE is planning to release these reports to the media with all the names attached. As you may know, this was recently done in Los Angeles, and once the reports were published, it was inevitable that news outlets here in New York City would file for the same information.

The possibility of this data being publicly released is deeply troubling, and we will be in court on Thursday to try and block it. It comes down to this — releasing and publishing these flawed reports does absolutely nothing to improve our schools or practices, and serves only to add to the growing confusion among parents and to further vilify teachers.

The Teacher Data Reports are significantly flawed in their current form due to the problems with state tests and inaccuracies within the data that the reports are based on. Not only have the state test scores been found wildly unreliable, but teachers are also finding corrupted and missing data in their reports.

What’s more, education experts agree that existing value-added systems such as TDRs are not yet reliable or valid, and they also agree that test scores by themselves can only represent a small segment of the complex work that you do. Education isn’t just about preparing students for tests. Education is about preparing students for life. A child is more than a test score, and we are there to help children learn and grow to be productive citizens. We will never give up that fight.

I’m asking everyone who has a TDR to examine your report for inaccuracies. We have good reason to believe that there is a lot of erroneous data in these reports, including students that were never taught by the teacher, the absence of entire classes, the improper inclusion of CTT classes with general education classes, and even the wrong subject entirely. If you do not have a copy of your TDR, you can access it here: https://tdi.wcer.wisc.edu/Login.aspx. Your principal should also be able to give you a copy of your report. We have prepared an easy guide to help you spot inaccuracies within a TDR. You can download our guide here. If you have questions about your TDR or you believe your data is inaccurate, please call or email us. Our TDR hotline is 212-598-6860 and our TDR email is tdrreports@uft.org.

The release of these Teacher Data Reports would be an unfortunate diversion from meaningful conversations about improving public education, and comes at a time when we are trying to develop a new and better evaluation system for educators. We hold ourselves to a higher standard, and we embrace accountability. That’s why the UFT worked this spring with the State Education Department to put in place a framework that focuses on multiple measures and minimizes the weight of test scores in a teacher’s evaluation. That approach was approved by the state legislature and now the DOE must negotiate with us on how to implement it.

I know that you are frustrated and angry by the growing anti-teacher sentiment. Be assured that standing together as a union and fighting for what is best for children is what we have always done and will continue to do. That includes not only fighting the release of these reports in court, but also setting up one-to-one support for members. If these reports are publicly released and teachers are defamed because of them, we will help them to personally sue the Department of Education.

These are the times when we need to be there for each other. Hold your heads up high. We are the ones that chose to make a difference in the lives of children every day, and we do it very, very well.

I will keep you updated as this issue develops.

Suing for defamation is good idea.

I might add Klein and Bloomberg and the media outlets that publish the reports to the lawsuits too.

But again I say, had the UFT not caved on this stuff beforehand, we wouldn't be here today.

Bloomberg and Klein ALWAYS intended to have these reports published in the media.

They think it backs up their case to get rid of tenure and "fire bad teachers."

The UFT has consistently played into their hands, allowed them to frame the issue (test scores can be used to show who is a good teacher and who is a bad teacher, teachers with low test scores should be fired, tenure protects "bad" teachers) and spent all their time reacting to assaults rather than proactively reframing the issues themselves (test scores are NOT the sole rationale for education, these tests are badly written and show little other than how much test prep students have done, value-added analysis has a huge margin of error that renders it worthless to use on individuals, publishing the names of "bad" teachers in the paper using a value-added system with a MOE of 25%+ is harmful to teachers, students and schools.)