An End to Rubber Rooms?

I first heard about “rubber rooms” in 2008, in an excellent episode of the radio show This American Life. It was a subject so ludicrous, so Kafka-esque, that I almost didn’t believe it was true: New York City teachers who are suspended from the classroom and told to report to a holding room, five days a week, to sit and do nothing. For reasons that were sometimes unknown to them. For months or sometimes years. While still receiving full salary.

The rubber room phenomenon is yet another maddening testament to the bureaucratic hurdles affecting the education system. Because teachers unions have fought fiercely to protect the rights of teachers, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to fire a teacher (recent massive teacher layoffs due to budgetary reasons notwithstanding). However, a set of sometimes murky standards qualifying teacher misconduct or incompetence, and a process of red tape so convoluted it sometimes seems no one is in charge, can leave teachers in a no man’s land where they’ve been suspended from active teaching but not from official employment. Thus, the rubber room.

Over 600 teachers are currently sitting in a rubber room — or “teacher reassignment center” — somewhere in NYC, and education officials estimate that they pay upwards of $30 million a year in salary to these individuals. A 2009 New Yorker article on rubber rooms points out that the experience may be engineered to be as boring as possible in order to encourage teachers to quit. So what do these people do all day? Some read. Others pass the time by playing board games or sleeping. Bizarre social hierarchies emerge among fellow rubber roomers. But one thing is for sure: they don’t get anywhere near the classroom.

Perhaps that’s a good thing. After all, many teachers in the rubber room are there because of gross misconduct, such as hitting a student, or gross incompetence. These individuals should have been fired immediately, but the review process can take months. Other teachers are in the rubber room due to a misunderstanding, or simply because they need to be transferred to a different school. Still others have never been told exactly why they are there.

But good news may be on the horizon. Mayor Bloomberg and the teachers unions have finalized a deal to speed up the review process for suspended teachers and do away with rubber rooms. However, the arduous process of getting rid of bad teachers won’t get much easier. In the last two years, the city has only managed to fire 3 teachers for incompetence, while scores more will continue to draw full pay while under review. Apparently, you can take the teacher out of the school, but you can’t take the incompetence out of the system.

Photo credit: normalityrelief