More Stubborn Facts: A Response To The New Teacher Project’s Tim Daly

In the previous post, Tim Daly of The New Teacher Project [TNTP] responded to the criticisms we made of the campaign the NYC Department of Education [DoE] has mounted against displaced [excessed] public school educators in New York City. Here we respond to his comments. We have organized our response around four key questions in the debate.

Why is there a large pool of displaced New York City public school educators?

According to the DoE’s and TNTP’s account, there are currently 665 displaced [excessed] New York City public school educators, men and women who have lost their original assignment for reasons entirely beyond their control. Educators find themselves placed in this pool as a result of decisions by the DoE to close their school or to reduce its size, and remain in it until they are able to find a new school assignment.

The issue of contention here is why this large pool exists, and why its numbers are growing. The DoE and TNTP have argued that the blame lies with the educators themselves – that those in the pool either do not diligently seek new assignments or are poor teachers no school wants to hire. This is the line of argument TNTP’s Daly recounts once again in his reply.

The truth is that the responsibility for this growing pool rests directly with the DoE. During the 2005 contract negotiations, the UFT told the DoE representatives that the changes they sought in staffing procedures would produce this pool; the DoE replied that they understood this would happen, and they were prepared to pay the cost. In 2006-07, the DoE changed the school budgeting process, putting teacher salaries into play in staffing decisions and creating disincentives for schools to hire senior teachers with higher salaries – all of which made it harder for senior teachers to find new assignments and leave the pool. As the pool grew in size, the DOE has refused to implement the clauses in the 2005 and 2008 contracts which were designed to move educators out of the pool – it has refused to execute a severance buyout for teachers in the pool [Article 17F], and it has refused to send displaced teachers as the first applicants to schools with open positions, before transfers or new hires [Article 17B, Rule 11]. In his response, Daly completely misrepresents our call to implement this last clause as a UFT demand for “forced placements” which “ignore the will of principals and teachers.” This distortion of our position is an effort to cover up the reality of how the DoE has organized the staffing process – displaced educators are usually the last applicants sent to schools with open positions, after most of the positions are already filled. In sum, every practical suggestion made by the UFT to abate the size of the pool, such as subsidies which would allow schools to hire senior displaced teachers for the cost of a new teacher, has been rejected out of hand by the DoE.

But rather than putting its own house in order and implementing in good faith the contractual clauses it negotiated to bring down the size of the displaced pool, the DoE has employed the TNTP to scapegoat and slander the hardworking and dedicated educators caught in that pool. It has decided that the existence of this pool provides a bludgeon in its campaign to win the power to fire teachers without due process, and it would rather have that weapon than seriously address the problem of the growing pool.

What portion of that pool of displaced educators is now engaged in full-time work, with a regular teaching schedule or regular guidance caseload?

After the DoE and the TNTP published Daly’s Mutual Benefits, with its attack on displaced educators, the UFT began our own research of the actual conditions of those serving in the pool. As we noted in our last post, we soon discovered that just less than 1/3 of the displaced educators – nearly 200 of the 665 in the pool – had been assigned regular teaching programs or regular guidance caseload. This revelation laid bare the lie that the displaced educators were poor teachers that no school wanted to hire.

In his reply, Daly attempts to impeach this number on three different grounds. First, he asserts that it is wrong to include guidance counselors in these calculations. He offers no reason for this exclusion other than the fact that his study did not bother to include them. While that is hardly a compelling logic, there were only eight guidance counselors in the nearly 200 cases we identified, so even if they were separated out, the conclusions one would draw from the data would be fundamentally unchanged.

Second, Daly makes a series of claims regarding displaced teachers from the closing of District 79. He did not include these displaced educators in the original study, he tells us, because the closing of District 79 schools was anomalous. Now, even if we accepted his current count of displaced District 79 educators, a number less than half of the 270 supplied by the DoE in September 2007 at the conclusion of the restructuring of the Alternative High School Superintendency, this would mean that he dropped 123 teachers from a study of some 665 displaced educators, and did not even bother to note, much less explain or defend, this major exclusion in as much as a single footnote. When one considers that the numbers of displaced teachers from District 79 were so great that they were not simply placed in new District 79 schools, but also in regular high schools and elementary schools, the most likely explanation is that a great many displaced District 79 educators did make it into the study, but in a haphazard way in which they were misidentified as displaced high school and elementary school teachers. However you cut it, this is an admission that places in serious question the basic design of this entire research project.

In general, note has to be taken here of Daly’s ex post facto justifications for not undertaking an analysis of the 2006-07 data, beyond the District 79 process, when that year would clearly provide the most recent and important insights into a growing phenomenon. Given that this is the same year that the DoE’s changes in school budgeting was introduced, one does not need to be much of a skeptic to conclude that the most recent and complete data was just dropped from the study because it would lead to inconvenient conclusions.

Third, Daly contends that our data on educators working full programs is unreliable because it is “self-reported” – by this he means that among other sources of information, we went to real schools and talked to real people to see what was actually taking place inside them. Note that the data which is being “self-reported” – whether a teacher has a regular teaching program vs. covering classes of absent teachers on a day to day basis – is hardly a grey area: one is as likely to mistake one for the other as one is to mistake teaching English Language Arts for teaching Algebra. Yet when you read the “methodology” section of Daly’s paper, it is painfully obvious that most of its analysis is based on “self-reported” data, surveys with very low rates of completion. If he truly believes his criticism of “self-reported data,” he has impeached his own study.

Has the DoE created a system of perverse incentives, which allows schools to use the services of displaced educators without paying for them?

In our post, we pointed out that the DoE had created a system of perverse incentives that allowed principals to obtain the full-time services of displaced teachers or guidance counselors without actually paying for them, since displaced teachers remain on the central payroll. In reply, Daly argues that one-third of the displaced teachers are on the payroll of the school which excessed them, rather than on the central DoE payroll. For the most part, displaced teachers on the central DoE payroll are from closing schools, while those who remain on the local school’s payroll come from schools in good standing. One could simply grant Daly’s numbers, and still conclude that a widespread system of perverse incentives exists for the great mass of schools with displaced teachers.

What is the true cost of pool of displaced educators?

Ever since the DoE and TNTP began their campaign against the displaced teachers, they have been telling everyone who will listen, from editorial boards to edubloggers, that the pool was costing New York City public schools $81 million. In our post, we noted that if the DoE had the power to fire all displaced educators, it would still have to replace all of the displaced educators with regular, full-time assignments, as well as hire substitutes for classes of the absent teachers now covered by the displaced teachers. In short, the UFT economists calculate, the true cost is a fraction of $81 million, between $18 and $19 million. We have no difficulty publishing the basis of our calculations, as Daly requests.

The most stunning statement in this entire response was Daly’s two word commentary on the UFT’s suggestions “that some of costs for ATR teachers are offset by savings elsewhere (for example, in reduced substitute costs).” “We agree,” he said. In short, whatever we might conclude about the true cost of the pool of displaced educators, Daly now concedes it is not the misleading $81 million.

Why have the DoE and TNTP spent the last weeks trumpeting to all who will listen a cost that the author of its own analysis now concurs was misleading?