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?

I’m in a PHD program, and a lot of my peers are worried about their prospects.  There are so few academic jobs out there, they’ll need to take whatever is offered to them.  And then there is the struggle for tenure—they’ll be expected to publish articles, write books and kiss senior faculty ass simultaneously.  How funny!  As a New York City public school teacher, I received tenure automatically after three years.  I am basically unfireable.

And this is not a good thing. A study by the New Teacher Project called “The Widget Effect,” notes that  ”less than 1% of teachers receive unsatisfactory ratings, even in schools where students fail to meet basic academic standards, year after year.” It goes on to note that in Los Angeles (to give just one example), less that 2% of tenure applications are denied—even though the percentage of students dropping out is 35%

In her New York Times piece, “Progress Slow in City Goal to Fire Bad Teachers,” Jennifer Medina shows that despite strong efforts from schools chancellor Joel Klein—including the creation of a special Teacher Performance Unit, the city has only managed to fire only three teachers for incompetence.

Joel I. Klein, the schools chancellor, said that the team, whose annual budget is $1 million, had been “successful at a far too modest level” but that it was “an attempt to work around a broken system.”

Anyone who has ever spent anytime kicking a can down the halls of a New York City public school knows that a significant percentage of all teachers are incompetent—just as a significant percentage of all workers in all areas of the economy are incompetent.  But unlike most other areas of the economy, New York City has agreed (under duress from the union) to a cumbersome firing and arbitration process that makes it almost impossible to get poor educators out of the classroom.

Medina’s piece shows how hard it is to remove teachers for plain old incompetence, as opposed to misconduct.  It’s not exciting for arbitrators to have to sit through observation report after observation report listing typos and misinformation spread by bad teachers.  Indeed, it is so hard to find qualified and interested arbitrators that the panel meets only five days a month.

This is not to say that it is any easier way to remove teachers who are engaged in misconduct.  They are out there as well, causing even more problems.

The real tragedy is that the biggest victims of teacher incompetence and misconduct are students who are from disadvantaged backgrounds.  They are less likely to push administrators for transfers into better classrooms and are less likely expect good teaching as a right.  And yet these are the groups that need good teachers more than anyone.

Easy tenure was great for me, but it’s not great for the schools, the city or the nation.  At some point, some courageous reformer is going to have to end this ridiculous process. Everyone should have to worry about keeping their job—especially teachers.