Last week, the New York City Department of Education and the United Federation of Teachers joined together to make a stunning announcement: New York City’s infamous rubber rooms are finally going to be closed. 

Amazing!  Astounding! What are the rubber rooms again?  If you haven’t read this article by Steven Brill or listened to this episode of This American Life or haven’t heard of this documentary, the rubber rooms are a series of offices around New York City where teachers accused of malfeasance sit all day, every day, and still collect their salaries.  This costs the city something like $30 million a year.

These rooms, informally named after the padded cells of a mental asylum, were designed to keep teachers away from students. A teacher at my school got sent to the rubber room after she appeared drunk in front of her class of freshmen and started regaling them with stories about her sex life.

These rooms exist because they prevent bigger problems from happening.  The Department of Education uses rubber rooms because they are a way to keep teachers that have not gone through the extremely time consuming arbitration process away from students.  The Union has supported them because teachers in the room are paid their full salary—which is sometimes in excess of $100,000—even if they have been accused of serious crimes.

But now, if we are to believe Chancellor Klein, UFT President Michael Mulgrew and Mayor Bloomberg, rubber rooms will soon be gone. The city plans to hire new arbitrators to speed up the process of disciplining rogue teachers and there also is going to be a new rule that teachers must be charged with an actual offense within 30 days of any accusation.  In lieu of being sent to the room, teachers will be given “administrative duties” inside and outside of schools—and this whole process is to begin in the fall.

It’s hard to evaluate these changes yet because talk is cheap.  The city has trod this path before, only to fail because budget constraints prevented the hiring of enough arbitrators to make the system move any faster.  The big issue, though, is that the underlying cause for the rubber rooms is still present: it is really hard to fire and discipline New York City public school teachers. This difficulty is leads to a need to warehouse kooks and thus we have rubber rooms.

It’s important to note that while some of the rubber room inhabitants are genuine perverts, many others have been placed there as a result of thinly sourced accusations.  Oftentimes a principal with a vendetta against a teacher will blow a minor incident out of proportion and use it as an excuse to send someone to the rubber room.  

The easy solution would be to allow principals to fire anyone they want.  If this happened, bad seeds could be immediately eliminated. And if a good teacher was the victim of a principal’s vendetta? Well; those are the breaks.  Plenty of good workers get shitcanned by stupid bosses in the private sector.

But that solution is problematic.  A for-profit entity can only fire so many good workers before their bottom line starts to suffer.  In the world of the market, removing competent people is a risky proposition.  In the public schools there is no profit and no generally accepted metric for measuring progress.

So what we need is an an adequate yardstick to really chart how well a student is learning.  If we can find that, then we can use it to put pressure on principals and remove the bad ones. And those remaining will then need the good teachers—their good work will be what preserves the principal’s job.  Then the principal will only have a desire—as well as a need—to fire the bad teachers.  

And then you have a real solution to the rubber room fiasco.  All we need is that perfect test of student achievement.  How hard could finding that test be?