New York City has reached an agreement to stop paying teachers who are sitting in a "rubber room" doing no work while they contest their firing. The city will also require principals and administrators to file charges against teachers within certain time frames, and pledges to speed up the hearing process. The teachers will still get paid, but they'll also be doing jobs outside of classrooms.
While I generally support unions and don't want anyone to be easily fired because of fickle disagreements with their supervisors, it's easy to find cases that go too far in New York City's Department of Education. And the rubber room situation isn't the only case.
While the agreement may solve the thorny public relations problems for the city and the union, it does nothing to address the more costly absent teacher reserve pool, which consists of teachers who have lost their jobs because of budget cuts or when a school is shut down for poor performance, but have not been accused of incompetence of wrongdoing. Those teachers, who now number about 1,100, do not have permanent classroom jobs but draw full salaries.
It should be easier to fire teachers who are incompetent, and there has to be a better solution for the reserve pool. It would help if the recruitment, training, and assessment of teachers were better in the first place.
-- Monica Potts
