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For three years, the DOE has confidentially assigned ratings to teachers. On Wednesday, the city planned to release that information.

The release of the data would be explosive. These are the supposedly confidential reports that assign each teacher a performance grade and percentile ranking, supposedly based on how much students improve while in their classroom. Almost all elementary and middle school math and English teachers get these scores.

NY1 was one of a few news agencies that asked for the scores through a Freedom of Information Law request, and city lawyers decided to give it to the station.

To be clear, NY1 would get the names of individual teachers, their school, and their score.

The teacher's union, though, is now requesting an injunction at the New York State Supreme Court. The union says its lawsuit will argue these reports are, “Unreliable, often incorrect, subjective analysis dressed up as scientific facts” and “...a complex and largely subjective guessing game on the part of the DOE.”

"We've looked at the first 20 reports that we had access to, and 13 of them have the wrong information in terms of they don't have the right students with the right teachers. So it's not good information," said United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew.

A DOE spokesperson says the agency still plans to release the information, saying, “While we respect UFT’s right to sue, we believe that the public has a right to this information under the law. Therefore, unless we are enjoined by the court, it is our intention to release the data on Friday afternoon to those news outlets who filed FOIL requests.”

The stakes are certainly very high, as 12,000 teachers learned Wednesday that anyone may soon be able to go online and see their rating. Hundreds of thousands of parents may, for the first time ever, be able to look up their child’s teacher and see how they are scored by the DOE.

For more than a thousand principals, it means they may have to answer to parents who want to know why their children are in a poorly-rated teacher’s class.

After a meeting at union headquarters Wednesday night, teachers who spoke with NY1 said they are worried.

"Teachers are very unhappy about this situation," said Jorge Mitey, a teacher at FDR High School. "We thought we had an agreement with the Chancellor and the Department of Education that all of the data in the pilot program that we entered into with them would be confidential. It's certainly not information that should be given to the public and to parents."

"Unfortunately, revealing the teacher data reports will not further their child's progress, because it is an unreliable piece of data. It is based on test scores that are invalid and have been said so by Harvard University and Columbia University," said David Waltzer, an English teacher at MS 158 in Queens.

While many parents agree the grades could be misleading, others say if the city has rated the quality of individual teachers, they should be able to see it.

"I think that it should be an individuals right to judge a teacher on what they feel is their opinion of them. It shouldn't be publicized because then you form an opinion that way without making your own opinion," said another.

"I think it's good. It informs the parents a little bit about what to expect in what may happen the next year in terms of teachers your child may be getting. So it can be informative for the parents," said one parent.

While the scores are based primarily on students’ scores on state tests, the formula does try to account for other factors that may affect the students’ scores, like poverty, race and gender.

Twenty-five percent of the teachers got high scores, 50 percent got average scores and 25 percent received poor marks.