December 13, 2010--The Rubber Room

On the same day that we learned that students in Shanghai's schools outscored everyone else in the world in reading, math, and science--even surpassing Singapore--and that public school children in the U.S. have sipped so far down the list that even kids from Estonia are doing much better than ours, we also learned that in New York City scores of teachers who have been judged to be incompetent have not only not been dismissed but they remain on the public payroll, assigned to do literally nothing but collect their paychecks but who are still expected to show up for "work" every day where they are assigned to hang out in what they self-mockingly refer to as "the rubber room." A term usually applied in a mean spirited way to the place in which "crazy' people are confined. (See linked New York Times article.)

At the moment there are 236 teachers who have been taken out of the classroom and assigned to make-work while their cases grind slowly through the review process. In some instances it has been more than two years since teachers have been required to show up each morning for their union-negotiated 6 hour, 50 minute day. A day during which, among other things, they are asked to hand out application forms, clip papers together, and measure the size of classrooms. With salary and benefits they earn on average more than $100,00 a year and thus the total annual cost to the city is about $30 million.

There are more than 100,000 public school teachers in New York so one can surmise that these 236 who have been accused of molesting children, repeatedly leaving them unattended, or year after year failing to produce even mediocre academic results are the literal bottom of the barrel.

The reason there are so few in this form of animated Purgatory is because of the difficulty of taking administrative action against even the most egregiously incompetent. All 236 have tenure, which is easy to achieve (hang in there for three years and one has a job for life) and an exceptionally powerful union (the UFT) which will leap to one's defense and spend many thousands of dollars protecting anyone accused of almost anything that is not a legal felony (though they defend those too). The system is so punishing to school principals and central administrators that almost all are reluctant to bring a teacher up on charges unless external forces force them to. The public school system in New York (and most big cities), where unions are all-powerful, is a case study of go-along-get-along.

So our children languish while suspended teachers are shuttled from rubber room to rubber room, counting the days until they can retire and forever receive $100,000 a year in pensions and other benefits while others, who should be removed, continue in the classroom protected by lifelong employment, administrative timidity, and work rules that make it nearly impossible to make things better for kids so they can compete with the Chinese and Estonians.