UFT: The Anonymous Surveys

Dear Colleagues,

The Department of Education and United Federation of Teachers are jointly encouraging all public school teachers to participate in New York City’s third annual survey of teachers, parents, and students. As an educator, you are an expert on your school, its needs and your kids’ needs. By filling out a survey, you are providing valuable information about your schools’ strengths—and helping to identify areas for improvement.

The DOE and UFT have jointly designed the survey and have jointly cooperated on the survey process, so it provides teaching professionals with a genuine opportunity to share your knowledge about your schools—and to do so anonymously. Teacher survey results are an important part of the School Environment category on the Progress Report, with a direct impact on the grades schools receive. Reports on overall survey results are also made public. This assures that teachers’ voices count.

We give teachers our solemn promise that their responses cannot and will not be traced back to them. The survey is completely anonymous. It is a disciplinary offense for any principal, administrator, or other DOE employee to violate that anonymity or the free exercise of answering the survey. That includes taking steps based on guesses about how any individual survey respondent might have answered a survey question, preventing teachers from completing surveys or interfering with their doing so, or influencing or manipulating teachers’ survey responses in any way. If you feel that anyone at your school is violating this policy, please contact your chapter leader. We will investigate any report of misconduct we receive.

If you completed the survey last year, this year’s survey should seem familiar to you. The one change is that teachers at more than 300 schools will be participating in an online-only program, whereby teachers will be saving paper, energy, and money by submitting answers using the Web survey. We want to make the survey as "green" as possible, so we strongly encourage all teachers--and not just those at "online only" schools--to complete the survey online.

Surveys will arrive at schools the first and second week of March. All paper and online teacher surveys are due by April 24. To learn more about the surveys—or find your school’s survey results from last year—please visit https://mail.nycboe.net/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://app.bronto.com/public/?q=ulink%26fn=Link%26ssid=4776%26id=87mn0y3z7jcfojj23zudrnfcihb1c%26id2=7lo0fujml69obu0nj1gj8ytn1lwbv. If you have any questions, please call (212) 374-6646 or e-mail surveys@schools.nyc.gov.

Sincerely,

Joel I. Klein
Chancellor President

Randi Weingarten
United Federation of Teachers