Rubber Rooms

A few months ago This American Life did a feature on the practice of using Rubber Rooms for New York public school teachers. You can find the episode here. The story on the radio show does not go into detail about why they have the rubber rooms in the first place, just what the experience is like once the teachers get in there. And that story is a quite interesting one. I actually remember that I was doing my nine mile run the day I was listening to this story and screaming out in my head that the reason why they exist in the first place is because of the power of the teacher's union.

I guess I should explain what the rubber room is - here is a recent story from the Associated Press about it, with this excerpt:

Hundreds of New York City public school teachers accused of offenses ranging from insubordination to sexual misconduct are being paid their full salaries to sit around all day playing Scrabble, surfing the Internet or just staring at the wall, if that's what they want to do.

Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them, the teachers have been banished by the school system to its "rubber rooms" — off-campus office space where they wait months, even years, for their disciplinary hearings.

Here is some additional explanation about why they get sent there:

Because the teachers collect their full salaries of $70,000 or more, the city Department of Education estimates the practice costs the taxpayers $65 million a year. The department blames union rules.

"It is extremely difficult to fire a tenured teacher because of the protections afforded to them in their contract," spokeswoman Ann Forte said.

City officials said that they make teachers report to a rubber room instead of sending they home because the union contract requires that they be allowed to continue in their jobs in some fashion while their cases are being heard. The contract does not permit them to be given other work.

My guy Jay Nordlinger brought up this story in his most recent Impromptu's column. He mentioned this:

Okay, want to take a walk down Memory Lane. When I was growing up, teachers were exalted as maybe the best and most important members of society. And many were! Their union, in turn, was held up as a noble organization. Whenever there was any dispute between the teachers and administration, the teachers were the good guys, wearing the white hats, and the administrators were the bad guys, wearing the black. Opposing teachers was akin to opposing saints.

As I got older, however, I started to change my mind: because it seemed to me that the union was making unreasonable demands, and that the teachers, sometimes, were less interested in education than in their own perks and unfirability. Which is understandable, of course. My point is, as I matured, I began to see more gray, and less black and white. This happened in my late teens, I would say.

I thought of this when reading (the story I just linked and took an excerpt from) from two days ago. The headline is “700 NYC teachers are paid to do nothing.”

Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t care whether you’re liberal or conservative, libertarian or Rastafarian: That’s a lousy way to run a railroad — a lousy way to run a school system — don’t you think?

So is anyone else seeing a problem with labor unions? The balance of power has tilted too much in favor of the unions. The UAW is wrecking the US auto industry and teachers unions all over the country seem to do little to help improve education. There is a lot of gray in these matters, but the black and white seems to indicate that if there's any kind of take home message, there should be at least some recognition as to the problem with power distribution between unions and administrators.

I was just realizing, that if I were a real thinker, I would now present my own solution to the problem here. My problem, however, is that I'm a novice when it comes to a lot of these political things, even though I'm still reading about stuff all the time, and have been following all of this for the last several years. How do you tackle the problem of unions v. government/business? I have gut reactions to some of these things, which I'd like to think are well informed, but I'm not always right, or well thought out enough. I'm working on it though. Let me get back to you.

And adieu.