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A Solution That is too Easy?

-- By JacquelynHehir - 17 Apr 2010

Just this week, School Chancellor Joel Klein and United Federation of Teachers union president Michael Mulgrew made an announcement that appeared as if it was meant to be revolutionary.

They are closing the “Rubber Room”.

Background

“Rubber Room” is the colloquial term for the infamous holding pens populated by New York City school workers who have been accused of a range of serious misconduct allegations. Officially the sites are reassignment centers. However, due to the extended and often uncertain length of time most accused spend in the centers, and the fact that the time is primarily spent in idleness, those involved have come to view them as similar to the padded cells of an asylum, giving birth to the nickname.

While the approximately 650 educators are in these reassignment centers they continue to be paid their full salary, at a cost that is estimated to be over 30 million dollars a year.

Purpose of this Paper

This paper is not, however, meant to address the admittedly pressing problem of wasting taxpayers’ dollars. Instead, it will examine the proposed solution with respect to a smaller, but important, issue associated with the rubber room; will it offer hope for those educators who are detained unfairly?

It has long been NYC teacher folklore that the reason so many educators spend time in the rubber room is because there is no real case against them. Now, of course, there are exceptions, and some of the people who are accused of misconduct are guilty and should absolutely be fired. However, it is very easy for a principal to convince a student or parent to make an exaggerated claim or two, and suddenly a teacher is facing serious allegations.

Likewise, as a former teacher I will confirm that, sometimes, trying to change the status quo or challenging school policy is more than enough to convince a principal that a few allegations are necessary to scare a teacher back into her place, if not get her sent away entirely.

Will this new system address these significant due process concerns?

The Solution

The proposed solution appears to involve three main components: 1) The Department of Education (DOE) is going to hire more arbitrators to hear the cases. 2) There will be a strict schedule requiring certain steps of the investigation process to take place in clearly defined lengths of time. 3) Most educators that have been accused of misconduct will perform clerical work in schools while they await their trial; those who have been accused of serious misconduct will be suspended entirely.

Will it Work?

This is not the first time that the Department of Education has tried to solve the rubber room problem. The last time the city and union tried to fix the situation, they reached an agreement to, well, hire more arbitrators. However, due to budget concerns, only three new positions were created, and it did little to alleviate the workload. So there is some historical evidence weighing against this solution.

More importantly, the arbitrators are not the only people involved in making these decisions. The cases need to be investigated, and prepared as well. Simply hiring more people who are involved in one aspect of the process is too little too late. Especially if the investigation and hearing process itself is not changed. Further, the New York City school system is an incredibly large system, with many administrative decisions being made on a school-by-school basis. Yet these schools are still, in theory, accountable to a centralized body. In practice, however, the DOE rarely has any idea about the politics or experiences within a particular school. In fact, the Department of Education has developed an elaborate system to indentify each school by a single letter grade, ensuring that anyone not creating the report can identify a school with the minimal amount of personal knowledge.

This proposed solution may result in the disconnected central body processing the cases more quickly. Yet the issue of system misuse, perpetuated by the administrators in the individual schools, will remain unseen and unaddressed.

Of course, this is not to imply that there are not cases where a teacher should be removed due to incompetence or misbehavior. However, a more effective solution to the issue of case overload would not only aim to hear cases more quickly, but to decrease the number of cases in the first place. If principals and other school administrators are held accountable for misuse of the hearing process, this would be a first step in lightening the overall load.

The Clerical Work Issue

Under the new system the teacher would not be sent to a special room to do nothing, but rather would be required to do clerical work. This is also problematic, since the wrongly accused teacher is not only unable to do the job she desires while the allegations are dealt with, she is also forced to do a job she does not want. Being forced to sit in idleness is bad enough, but to have your abilities co-opted to aid an educational system that is persecuting you unfairly is a particularly egregious fate for the wrongly accused teacher.

The clerical work aspect is not necessarily always a bad idea. Forcing a teacher who is rightly accused to do clerical work, on the other hand, is less troublesome, especially since the teacher can choose to leave the DOE if she would rather not participate in the assigned work until she is formally dismissed. However, it does emphasize the need to attack system abuse in addition to case overload.

Conclusion

A better solution would try to solve the dual problems of removing teachers who are ineffective or dangerous to students from the classroom, while protecting educators targeted for whistle blowing or related issues and increase the rate at which cases are decided. Simply hiring more arbitrators, who participate in the very end of the process, without holding school administrators accountable, is unlikely to accomplish both these goals.

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