No More Rubber Rooms

It's hard to believe but for years New York City Public School teachers who were suspended from teaching and awaiting disciplinary hearings were sent to so-called "rubber rooms." These were places where they sat all day, did nothing -- and got paid for it. (As far as I know these rooms weren't literally padded like Supermax prison cells but the tedium of being in them every day was apparently the same).

The teachers exiled to them were often accused of incompetence, sometimes of gross misbehavior, but ,whatever their alleged infraction, union rules made it impossible to fire them. Instead, they had to wait ... and wait ... and wait ... and wait, sometimes for years in these rooms, until they finally got their hearings. Meanwhile they earned their salary and full benefits, costing the taxpayers around $30 million a year. Think of that? $30 million to pay people to do nada.

This is ending. Today the Bloomberg administration announced that the rubber rooms will be no more; instead these teachers will be assigned clerical or other non-classroom jobs. So finally we taxpayers will be paying these semi-laid off teachers to do something productive and stop wasting money. Sounds like a good idea.

These rubber rooms sound almost like these terrorist detention camps: the people in them are basically being warehoused. Some of them clearly should be there while others ... well ... it's not so clear if their imprisonment is really legally justified. They're in limbo.

Last year the veteran journalist Steven Brill did a long story for The New Yorker about the teachers who populate[d] these rubber rooms. It paints a fascinating picture of why unions are good things overall (protecting workers from exploitation, abuse, firing women for getting pregnant, etc.) but how certain union rules can lead to unproductive waste (like rubber rooms). And it's also clear from this article that some these teachers are either just lousy or unfit to educated students.

Sometimes I have to wonder, however, if these rubber rooms were being used for less than noble purposes. Clearly sending teachers there was a form of psychological gamesmanship: the Department of Ed. wanted to make them so unpleasant and boring that hopefully the teachers would just quit. (WNYC did a great story today about life in the rubber rooms.) But the thing that really disturbed me was how teachers who had been teaching for years and years were suddenly declared "incompetent" and banished into these gulags.

Really? A teacher is told that she's doing a fine job for years and then, all of a sudden, is told "Oh, you're no good. Get out." It's odd. Makes no sense. It seems to me that if someone is being told that they're doing a job well for years and then, all of a sudden, they're told that they're a failure and need to leave ... well, something else is going on. I think this is about forcing out older teachers who have accrued high salaries and pensions so that the city doesn't have to pay as much. It's also about, as these stories suggest, new principals who come in, decide they don't like certain teachers, and then suddenly say they're "incompetent" and force them out.

Oh, but that would be being cynical now wouldn't it? And of course the Bloomberg administration never does anything that would make a New Yorker think it would do something sleazy? But at least the rubber rooms are no more ... and that's probably a step in the right direction.