Posted on 04/16/2010 9:33:07 AM PDT by mainsail that
NEW YORK - The city will end the practice of paying teachers to play Scrabble, read or surf the Internet in reassignment centers nicknamed "rubber rooms" as they await disciplinary hearings, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the teachers union announced Thursday.
The deal will close the centers, where hundreds of educators spend months or years in bureauratic limbo, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars a year.
"It's an absurd abuse of tenure," Bloomberg said.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Gee, the money is running out and someone had to be cut off first. See tagline.
I’m shocked the teacher’s union would go along with this — what did they get in return?
They are getting aid to indoctrinate and that’s what they should be doing.
‘bout time. But it never would’ve even hit the radar cept for the NY Post
Most of our Congress belong in a rubber room.
A few more shut-down wastes like this and we can re-open NASA, right ?
Right ?
This might be an abuse of tenure — it also sounds like an abuse of justice.
Just as it takes more than one to tango; it takes more than one to do the bureaucratic limbo.
Why do these cases drag out for months or years? What happened to the principle of “justice delayed is justice denied”. For that matter, what happened to “innocent until proven guilty”? It's almost a certainty that some of these “rubber room” inmates are innocent — the victims of false accusations.
The officials in charge need to crank up the wheels of justice — stomp on the guilty & clear the innocent ASAP.
Probably nothing, think of car unions a year ago: Other people’s money is running very short in NYC.
I remember the days of 110 Livingston Street in Brooklyn, the school HQ where useless ex-principals and bureaucrats were sent to get them out of the way. Unfortunately, it also ran the NYC public school system.
Then the NYC schools were “decentralized.” So, now I guess they must have “rubber rooms” all over the city, instead of just in Brooklyn.
Apparently there’s still some sort of school investigative HQ at Livingston Street, and a report I found from 2008 says that they were in the news for burying a report on—what else?—corruption in the schools.
So they are being put on administrative pay?
I wish as a clerk I earned the kind of money these guys earn.
Believe me, NY teacher pay is a racket. Whenever I hear the “teachers are underpaid” theme, well, they ain’t talking about NY.
I suspect the problem is the administrators know these teachers are no good, and want to separate them from students, but don’t have enough hard evidence to terminate them in a full blown procedural hearing.
Well, I think the teachers are just going to be reassigned to admin duties in schools. They will not be fired. No way.
This has been going on for years, yet just days after Glenn Beck brings it to national attention on his tv show, it’s closed down. Coincidence?
nice try, Bloomie....but you know some judge or arbitrator is eventually going to order them reinstated with back pay and penalties
This hit the radar a long, long time ago. Everyone who lives in NYC has known about this for many years. It’s been going on for decades.
Bloomie’s a nutcase when it comes to guns, transfats, etc, but he deserves credit for his success in dealing with unions. A few years back, there was a major fire in an electrical room controlling several key subway lines. The union responsible for fixing it immediately announced to the media that repairs would take something like 3 years! I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when Bloomie explained to them why it was NOT going to take 3 years or anything close. Whatever he said, the subway lines were running normally again in about 2 weeks. Bloomie’s strength is that he’s a self-made billionaire who really truly believes in capitalism and hard work. His patience with lazy-bum unions who devastate the bottom line is near zero.
They’re being kept on the same pay, but required to take administrative jobs to get it. For decades, the union position has been that if you’re a teacher, the only work you do is teach. If you get yanked out of the classroom, you can’t be required to do any other kind of work, and you can’t be fired until your case is “resolved” (and the union makes sure that takes years), so you sit in a room reading magazines, playing with your GameBoy, or whatever you feel like doing. That’s what has changed now, along with the imposition of short time limits for resolving these cases.
Now they have to move all the gay and lesbian books to the front of the library.
Oh. I just remember seeing it in the NYP with pictures of some of the teachers sleeping in a room.
Having many friends who are DOE educators, I have an inside look at what’s really what in the NYC education scene that many people don’t have. First of all, It is absolutely APPALLING that the media has continuously bashed teachers within its pages, particularly those assigned to the “Rubber Room”. Most of those teachers have, in truth, done NOTHING wrong. They are in effect political prisoners. China or the old USSR have nothing on the Bloomberg version of the camps. Some of the teachers assigned to “Rubber Rooms”, unfortunately, have in fact been incompetent or actually committed a crime. And they should, of course, be removed from the classroom. But they are a very small minority of the hundreds of teachers in “Rubber Rooms”. A very small minority indeed. The teachers may have been whistleblowers on unscrupulous administrators, and their reward was to be falsely accused of hastily drawn-up charges and sent to the “Rubber Room”. Students who justly received failing grades for poor quality work are actively encouraged to write statements against their teachers, which are then used to “justify” charges against that teacher. And they end up in the “Rubber Room” for no authentic reason at all. Oh, and if the charges are found to be false, the teacher’s name is still blackened but there are NO consequences to the students, none at all. It’s such fun to get some get-back at your competent teacher who justly gave you a failing grade for low quality work or who told you to be quiet so that a lesson could proceed and people could actually learn, or who had your cell phone confiscated. Every single day since the dawn of time, teachers have had to raise their voices in class when polite requests for quiet are ignored. By rewriting definitions, this has now become a criminal offense, corporeal punishment, under Bloomberg and it’s been given the title “verbal abuse”. “Corporeal” refers to “bodily” and this sort of punishment originally meant that teachers could not physically strike students. Many teachers reassigned to “Rubber Rooms” did nothing more than speak a little too loudly. Principals with a lot of older and hence expensive teachers have been very busy inventing all sorts of ludicrous charges to then clear their school budgets of these high-priced veterans, whose salaries are then eventually taken over by the central DOE-—off the budgets of the individual school. This decentralization of salary payments was instituted by Bloomberg, and presents an obvious incentive to get rid of expensive teachers—by any means. The point is, the vast majority of the teachers sitting in the “Rubber Rooms” are falsely accused by their school administration based on questionable evidence, and would much rather be TEACHING kids than sitting around. And if you, a highly educated and intelligent person, were forced to sit basically immobile in an overcrowded room, only allowed to walk around during the lunch hour, what exactly WOULD you do to pass the hours? These people are not criminals, but they are being treated so. These people are not lazy bums, but they are being characterized as such. Bloomberg created the “gotcha” parameters, then pays off the media to defame those so accused (and usually innocent), inflaming public opinion against these unjustly maligned educators and thus gaining a favorable position with which to negotiate a less favorable contract for teachers. What is so hard to see about this? Yet judging from the comments posted by many here, Bloomberg’s counting on an easily roused mob mentality (”Lynch them teachers! Hang ‘em high!”) worked admirably.
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