In a windowless room in a shabby office building at Seventh Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street, in Manhattan, a poster is taped to a wall, whose message could easily be the mission statement for a day-care center: “Children are fragile. Handle with care.” It’s a June morning, and there are fifteen people in the room, four of them fast asleep, their heads lying on a card table. Three are playing a board game. Most of the others stand around chatting. Two are arguing over one of the folding chairs. But there are no children here. The inhabitants are all New York City schoolteachers who have been sent to what is officially called a Temporary Reassignment Center but which everyone calls the Rubber Room.
These fifteen teachers, along with about six hundred others, in six larger Rubber Rooms in the city’s five boroughs, have been accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or, in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent.
The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day””which is pretty much nothing at all. Watched over by two private security guards and two city Department of Education supervisors, they punch a time clock for the same hours that they would have kept at school””typically, eight-fifteen to three-fifteen. Like all teachers, they have the summer off. The city’s contract with their union, the United Federation of Teachers, requires that charges against them be heard by an arbitrator, and until the charges are resolved””the process is often endless””they will continue to draw their salaries and accrue pensions and other benefits.
As an attorney, I represented school districts for nearly 20 years. The NYC situation may be extreme, but not by much. In my experience the majority of teachers are hard working and dedicated, but the few bad ones are very hard to weed out.
In a sane world we would just hit the flush button to unload bad teachers who have severely violated the most basic tenets of their vocation. Now we warehouse them with the full financial support of the public teat. How very far we have come in our diligent flight from sanity. God help us!
NYC is NYC.
As a retired school administrator I managed not to renew a number of teachers for either incompetence, sloth or absenteeism. I usually managed to do it during the “probationary period”. But early on I managed to non-renew a veteran of many years for incompetence–something that apparently others had hesitated to do because her husband was a political power in the community and so has simply shifted her from position to position where they thought she might do less harm. It did take me two years to document the case. When I went to my board, their reaction was that they wondered how long it would take me. She did consult a lawyer, who apparently told her, “Forget it, he’s got you.” And my predecessor, when she learned what I had done confessed, “I should have done it before I left.”
I will admit that as a classroom teacher, I did see cases in other districts where incompetent teachers were promoted to supervisory positions where presumably they would do less damage. And we teachers simply learned to ignore them and do our jobs teaching our children.
“I should have done it before I left.â€
I find myself wondering how much of that goes on these days. There sure seems a lot of desire to avoid difficult decisions that have consequences, not just in education but across the board.
Among many other things, we need to pray for good leaders to be raised up in our time.