Rewrite of Rubber Rooms

Described by its contingents as "Kafka-esque," prison-like, and just plain boring, NYC reassignment centers house public-school teachers with alleged contract violations, ranging from incompetency to assault. Some teachers are transferred to these centers without being informed of their alleged infractions. Legally, administrators may delay giving notice to teachers for up to six months, and in practice, some teachers can wait years before being officially charged.

Known as “rubber rooms,” these buildings provide a place for teachers to stay while their salaries continue to be paid, and also ensure that litigation against school districts is kept at a minimum. At the same time, rubber rooms are incredibly wasteful, both of taxpayers’ money and teachers’ lives, particularly those who have no valid case against them. For these reasons, the city’s teacher’s union and the mayor recently reached a compromise wherein rubber rooms will be shut down by December 2010.

The main problems rubber rooms presented to teachers were their punitive nature and the fact that teachers were often given inadequate process to be assigned to these rooms in the first place. For administrators, rubber rooms were costly and a poor means of firing incompetent teachers. Will the compromise of scrapping these rooms and allowing teachers to perform administrative work inside their buildings, while ensuring speedier process, solve these problems?

The rubber rooms themselves are just a powerful symbol of the inadequate process being provided to schoolteachers. One teacher, suspended for several months, complained that, "I have yet to be contacted by a lawyer. So I really don't know when that's going to be. So I'm just sitting here waiting." In the compromise, the city attempts to address this problem by hiring 16 more arbitrators to hopefully weed out the false allegations from the truthful ones.

The Trouble with Firing Teachers

Analysis of the Solution in Light of Budgetary Concerns

"To tell you the truth, it doesn't matter where we wait, it's the process of waiting."