If Kafka designed an education system

Stephen Brill has a long article in the New Yorker about New York City's infamous "rubber rooms" where teachers who are accused of incompetence or abusing students in some way are sent to wait out the appeals process. That process can take several years, but their union contract requires that they be paid fully with benefits and accruing years towards their pension during that entire time. So the school system requires that they report to a sparsely decorated room where they...sit. All day long, year after year.

In a windowless room in a shabby office building at Seventh Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street, in Manhattan, a poster is taped to a wall, whose message could easily be the mission statement for a day-care center: “Children are fragile. Handle with care.” It’s a June morning, and there are fifteen people in the room, four of them fast asleep, their heads lying on a card table. Three are playing a board game. Most of the others stand around chatting. Two are arguing over one of the folding chairs. But there are no children here. The inhabitants are all New York City schoolteachers who have been sent to what is officially called a Temporary Reassignment Center but which everyone calls the Rubber Room.

These fifteen teachers, along with about six hundred others, in six larger Rubber Rooms in the city’s five boroughs, have been accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or, in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent.

The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day—which is pretty much nothing at all. Watched over by two private security guards and two city Department of Education supervisors, they punch a time clock for the same hours that they would have kept at school—typically, eight-fifteen to three-fifteen. Like all teachers, they have the summer off. The city’s contract with their union, the United Federation of Teachers, requires that charges against them be heard by an arbitrator, and until the charges are resolved—the process is often endless—they will continue to draw their salaries and accrue pensions and other benefits.

“You can never appreciate how irrational the system is until you’ve lived with it,” says Joel Klein, the city’s schools chancellor, who was appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg seven years ago.

Then there are the teachers who are on the "reserve list." That's where teachers whose jobs have disappeared through closing a school or for other reasons are put. They are paid full salary while they wait to be employed elsewhere. The good teachers are snapped up by other schools or used by substitutes. It's only the teachers with the most dismal records whom no principal wants to hire who remain after nine months. But they are there on the list getting paid for not teaching.

It's estimated that the annual cost of warehousing all these teachers totals more than a hundred million dollars.

Yes, it would be terrible to be falsely accused of molesting a student or of being incompetent. But the unions have negotiated such lengthy adjudication procedures that, as Brill points out, an average case takes longer than the O.J. trial. And the union still doesn't have a poster case of someone who had been falsely accused. The case they trumpet on their website is about a woman who repeatedly passed out in an alcoholic haze.

Read the entire article and it will become clear that this is a system totally devoted to protecting teachers, whether they be incompetent or criminal. The amount of documentation and time required of a principal to try to get rid of such teachers is so onerous that only the very worst are in this situation. The interests of children are not of any concern to the union. Other school systems don't have rubber rooms. Other businesses can get rid of incompetent employees. And with the damage done to children who spend even one year in an incompetent teacher's classroom shouldn't we err on the side of the children rather than on the side of the accused teachers?

Meanwhile, read Jay Mathews' account of what is involved for a gifted teacher to get his certification acknowledged by the school system in Prince George's County. This is a story well familiar to any teacher in a public school system. All the emphasis is on getting credits from approved sources whether or not such courses do anything to improve a teacher's abilities to teach and little credit is given for advanced degrees outside of education programs.

It is difficult to argue that Keiler, 49, is anything but one of his county's best teachers. He is the only member of the Bowie High faculty with National Board Certification, having passed a competitive series of tests of his classroom skills that has become a gold standard for American educators. He has a bachelor's degree in philosophy and history from Salisbury University and a law degree from Washington and Lee University. He served four years as an Army Judge Advocate General officer, then was a partner in a private law firm in Bethesda until, as he puts it, he "got sick of law and became a social studies teacher at my alma mater."

He teaches a survey course called Practical Law, as well as Advanced Placement World History and AP Art History. More students signed up for his classes this year than he had periods to teach them. He coaches Bowie's Mock Trial team, the most successful in the county. He has published articles on military history and law in several magazines.

He hates the education school courses teachers must take to be certified and qualify for pay increases. He says they "are generally no more useful or interesting than watching paint dry." But he dutifully accumulated three credit hours at Bowie State University, six through the county's continuing professional education program and three for going through the National Board process. That was more than enough, he was told, for his standard certification.
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Then earlier this month, the county's teacher staffing and certification office informed him that previous officials counted his credits wrong. If Keiler didn't somehow produce three extra credits by the end of September, he would be decertified and any pay increases he received associated with certification would be retroactively revoked.

Also, he was told, don't try to claim any more for that law degree. For years, the school system gave him zero credential credit for his three years at Washington and Lee, one of the nation's top law schools, even though he teaches a course on law and coaches Mock Trial. Eventually officials said he could claim three credit hours for the constitutional law course he took and get some extra pay, but that was it.

This teacher's Kafkaesque nightmare ended when Jay Mathews started writing a column about him and calling the school system. How many other teachers who don't have a Washington Post columnist going to bat for them suffer through the bizarro world that is the teacher certification process in many school systems.

If you're interested in education issues, read both articles. You'll be shaking your head the entire time in amazement that we allow such Kafkaesque procedures to continue when the education of our children is at stake.