Where the Rubber Meets the Kiko: Mayor Bloomberg, Chancellor Joel Klein, and the New York Department of Education Await You in "the Rubber Room"

Little Johnny Martinez-Roach, a student in your fifth period government class, slumps two seats behind his ex-girlfriend, Suzie Shirakawa, fresh from her recent triumph as the fourth runner-up in the county’s Hormel Foods-sponsored junior miss competition. Upon turning 17 two days ago, Johnny received an 80 gig iPod from his parents and half an ounce of hash from his closest friends, the nascent effects of both simultaneously exacerbate his inherent inattentiveness as he sits through your lecture. A twenty-five year classroom veteran with a master’s from Princeton, you’d have politely reminded Johnny about the school’s electronic device policy and the appropriate decorum you expect all mannered students to display in class had you been able to notice the trace of a white headphone cord dangling from Johnny’s ear like an ill-placed strand of angel hair pasta thrown by a slightly inebriated Italian grandmother busily preparing the Sunday meal in her kitchen’s cramped confines. Your eyes, unfortunately, still need to adjust to the new bifocal prescription, for which you paid 90% of the cost having exhausted the remaining funds allocated under your district’s benefits cap.

The class appears to be engaged in your lecture on presidential politics and the history of the electoral college. You end with the self-assured declaration, “And that’s why Senator Dole lost the ’96 election.” However, twenty minutes of burning hash and a forty-five minute lecture accompanied by an iPod-generated System of a Down soundtrack lead Johnny to think you said, “I like Susie’s hole, please hold my erection.” Johnny nearly coughs up a lung. When they were dating, he suspected Susie had a thing for older guys, he had no idea she was into men with comb-overs.

With one class remaining, Johnny sobers a bit and gathers the courage to report his suspicions to the principal, a man whose thirty-odd years in education (twenty-six as an administrator) began with a four-year stint as some sort of industrial arts teacher with concurrent duties as the special teams coach for the high school’s football team. The next morning he pulls you into his office accusing you of engaging in pedophilia and other assorted degenerate acts. Yes, you! A Rotarian and 1998’s proud recipient of the local Toastmasters “Educator of Excellence” award!

Your spirit crushed, your mind racing, somewhere through the shock you demand union representation. “This is exactly why I pay $85.00 a month in dues,” you think, “It’s not just for cheap car insurance and travel discounts. They’ll protect me against baseless accusations and unfounded administrative attacks” — especially from a shop teacher with a dismal 1 and 4 high school coaching record.

In most states, say 49 of them, your contract would ensure you due process rights when charged with such a serious crime. You, however, teach in New York City. Your union rep comes in the room, shrugs his shoulders and says, “Sorry comb-over. Starting tomorrow you’ll need to report to the district’s temporary reassignment center until our investigation is complete.”

Welcome to The Rubber Room.

The various districts that make up New York City’s school system throughout the five boroughs have instituted a method for punishing tenured teachers accused of inappropriate conduct, suspected criminal malfeasance, or poor classroom performance. While the districts and the NY Department of Education call them “Temporary Reassignment Centers,” they are better known by the moniker “Rubber Rooms.” The term Rubber Room derives from the punishment’s desired effect: demoralized teachers will “bounce off the walls” when forced into indefinite limbo in the hope of causing the accused to resign from his or her position. A teacher placed in a Rubber Room (sometimes for years), continues to collect a full salary but does nothing the entire time they are there until their individual case is resolved.

Team Unruly was unable to determine how long this degrading practice has been in place. Circumstantial evidence points to the early days of Mayor Bloomberg’s administration, though his dictatorial management style might only have increased the incidents of rubber room abuse. Why New York has adopted this practice depends on whose argument you choose to buy. District administrators cry foul over a collective bargaining agreement they feel ties their hands when it comes to disciplining tenured teachers, implying the rubber room is a flawed but necessary recourse until the union agrees to changing the contract () Business leaders and right-leaning newspapers scream for reform to the whole system, and demonize the union as too protectionist; they side with administrators and take the interpretation a step further. They see the rubber room as a creation of a union hell-bent on protecting the salaries of their members: (). Team Unruly feels the evidence points to a despotic attempt to force a bargaining issue — revising procedures for dismissing tenured teachers — onto the negotiation table by demoralizing the union until they cave from the pressure, and by making tenure reform part of the public debate on education.

If our interpretation is correct, then that plan appears to be working. The New York Daily News ran a weeklong series of editorials calling for massive and rapid reform of New York’s school system, placing nearly all of the failure blame on teachers and their union. Two of the editorials specifically focus on the problems with firing incompetent teachers. One laments that a principal must follow 54 steps to fire an incompetent teacher because of the union rules regarding tenure. () Their editorial board also argues that the tenure laws are so draconian they are to blame for the existence of rubber rooms, with the underlying implication that teachers like the rubber room because they get paid for doing nothing. The article includes a flowchart that they obtained from a bi-partisan legal reform organization called “Common Good.” Take a trip to the Common Good website and you find the claim that it actually takes 83 steps to fire an incompetent tenured teacher (). There’s something screwy when a journalist cites an information source and quotes a completely different figure. As one would expect, the flowchart itself overstates some steps and allows the Daily News editorial board to draw false conclusions. (). The grievance process Common Good details is fairly standard for most unions; it ensures employees receive due process when evaluated by an administrator and in theory protects employees from being unfairly punished by over-zealous administrators. The devil is in the flowchart details. Most grievance chains go no further than level three. For some reason, New York has a fourth level. Why? While the Daily News blames the union, the real culprit here is none other than Mayor Michael Bloomberg. A level four grievance goes to the office of the “Chancellor of Education,” a position created by Bloomberg when he pushed for —and received — control of the New York school system. He appointed attorney Joel Klein to the position, fresh from his stint as the anti-trust attorney who famously took on Microsoft. Additional steps beyond level three, it seems, are paved with Bloomberg’s edicts.

The other Daily News editorial focuses specifically on the rubber room issue, but develops its argument on false premises, hasty generalizations, and worst-case examples to define the whole. The argument does not stand up to close scrutiny. The fact that they dedicate an editorial to this issue implies a crisis that by their own numbers does not appear to exist. They claim “an astonishing 400 teachers sit idle in rubber rooms,” but they also tell us New York employs 80,000 teachers. That’s less than half a percent of New York’s teachers — hardly an astonishing figure. They claim the collective bargaining agreement forces administrators to spend 20 million a year on the rubber rooms, but fail to note that a teacher suspected of illegal or unprofessional activity could just as easily be put on paid leave without the additional expense of the rubber room. They use two extreme examples of male teachers propositioning students to claim the current system allows criminals to remain employed because of technicalities. The technicality they single out is labeled the “Weingarten rule” after the union’s president Randi Weingarten, who apparently has the unmitigated gall to extend New York teachers the same right people in most labor unions have: the right to have a union representative present when an administrator meets with an employee. By pointing out the technicalities, the paper inadvertently implies that incompetent administrators failed to follow correct procedure. Why couldn’t these principals head down the hall and call in a union rep for the accused? Is contacting a school site’s union rep that difficult a process? Where were the unsatisfactory evaluations before these teachers received tenure and firing didn’t require a belabored process? Doesn’t that unreported fact hint at administrative incompetence?

The money quote comes near the end, where a false analogy is used to justify their position, arguing “Most normal organizations would fire an executive who came on to a subordinate the way Hershkowitz and this music teacher did - without a rubber room, without a Weingarten rule, without years of hearings and without a doubt as to the need to enforce proper behavior between adults, let alone between an adult and a minor.” (). They are absolutely right to condemn the criminal actions of these two teachers. Any reasonable person would. But the reasonable person standard does not help define what the Daily News feels constitutes a “normal organization.” If a normal organization swiftly fires executives for inappropriate sexual conduct against a subordinate, their logic forces us to ask these hard questions: is Oakland Unified a “normal organization,” and if so, will Randy Ward be stepping down at the end of the month? ().

The biggest problem The Unruly Advocate has with the Daily News article is the implied assumption that incompetent teachers like being sent to the rubber room, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Team Unruly finds this draconian punishment the most demoralizing anti-teacher practice ever devised. It verifies what we’ve argued in nearly every article we’ve ever written. The real crisis in education lies with autocratic administrators, totalitarian superintendents, and inept school boards whose caustic personalities and destructive policies devastate the communities they purport to serve. It’s easy to see the UFT didn’t come up with the rubber room idea. Who better to craft such foolish policy than the despots and Machiavels running the New York school system?

The New York Daily News got one point right: even when compared to other districts run by petty tyrants, the New York Public School System is far from being a normal organization. Unruly critics call the NY Department of Education the “Ministry of Fear” because of the Big Brother tactics they employ to squelch whistleblowers. They, along with Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein, are seen as having created a culture of terror that threatens to punish teachers if they publicly air concerns about the school system. Betsy Gotbaum’s story is a prime example. In her non-education role as an Office of the Public Advocate official, Betsy Gotbaum released a requested report on the quality of Special Education Programs in New York to the media. Since her office is not part of the school system, the DOE filed a Freedom of Information Act request to force her to turn over the documents, emails, and phone logs of everyone she contacted in compiling her data. Why? Because the DOE wanted to generate an enemies list. While you’re at it, check out the story’s accompanying cartoon:(). And it’s not just the DOE; Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein’s dictatorial management is also taking its toll on New York’s educators. Even the conservative Hoover Institute, which favors business-style management and market incentives as central to reforming education, implies that Bloomberg’s model of reform uses “dictatorial mayoral control” and Klein’s tyranny has destroyed teacher morale ().

Maybe there are a few doubting skeptics out there who might say, “C’mon Team Unruly. I watch Law and Order SVU and I agree with Ice-T. Anything we can do to get criminal sex offenders off the streets is okay in my book. What’s the harm if these rubber rooms are only filled with perverts and incompetent teachers?” To you we say au contraire, mon ami — when a dictator’s in charge and the head office compiles a list of suspects, enemies will suffer retribution by those willing to abuse power through an abusive system. All it takes is an allegation. ().

Like the Daily News, we can cite some pretty egregious examples of Big Brother in action. Take the case of Mr. Kaufman. Kaufman’s classes over the years won some fairly substantial competitions, including a citywide stock market simulation and a citywide playwriting competition. Those accomplishments are even more amazing once you learn Mr. Kaufman teaches incarcerated students on Riker’s Island. His terrible crime appears to have been becoming a union rep. As the union rep for the Riker’s Island school, he blew the whistle on how bad school services are on Riker’s, embarrassing Riker’s principal, Frank Dody. Dody used a technicality to send Kaufman to a Brooklyn Rubber Room for three months. Kaufman suspects vengeance was the motive: .

Then there’s the story of David Pakter, an award winning 37 year teaching veteran, who works at a high school that serves a large minority population. The school’s principal decided to close the music program and offer an after-school music program instead. The after-school program, however, did not serve neighborhood kids; it served predominately white students from an affluent elementary school. Outraged, Pakter videotaped the elementary school students during their lesson, intending to blow the whistle on the principal. The Principal demanded Pakter turn over the video; Pakter refused. He was sent to the rubber room and ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. Scroll down further and discover that his salary was frozen in an attempt to force him to quit. The principal also tried to pay off the DOE-appointed psychologist to declare Pakter “bi-polar.” A year after his rubber room trip, the charges were dropped.

We’re not sure if Philip Nobile ever went to the rubber room, but he was given the E-ticket for admission. His crime? Besides being a union rep? Complaining to authorities that his vice-principal asked teachers to change, or “scrub”, the scores on the state Regent’s exams, New York’s high school honors examination program. Turns out his principal and the superintendent were in on the scrubbing. In retaliation his vice-principal, Ms. Capra, his principal, Mr. George, and an administrator from the regional DOE office, gave Nobile “unsatisfactory” evaluations, even though he had earned positive evaluations in the previous school year. A DOE investigation eventually cleared Nobile. Were the administrators sent to a rubber room? Hardly. The embarrassed vice-principal resigned, the principal was removed — not fired, and, true to form, the superintendent suffered the oh so egregious indignity of having a letter placed in his folder.

Though it lacks detail, perhaps because there isn’t much to say when doing nothing, a teacher interred in a rubber room contacted Karen Horowitz at the NAPTA (National Association to Prevent Teacher Abuse) website. If the words “Orwellian,” “Kafkaesque” or “Gulag” come immediately to mind, we don’t blame you. 150 incarcerated people sit in a large room for the length of a school day. Security guards watch over the group, and folks suspect that a handful of retirees come in to spy on whatever it is a group of incarcerated teachers might do. The not-so-big surprise? The bulk of the rubber roomed are there because they got on some abusive administrator’s bad side.

In spite of the overwhelming evidence citing the many rubber room abuses by corrupt administrators or the sufferings of the falsely accused , union officials caved to the strong arm tactic and promised to expedite the process principals follow to fire incompetent teachers. . The rubber room ploy worked.

The Kiko Award is not just about chronicling the misadventures of the wicked and corrupt, it’s an award that celebrates that peculiar kind of irony only a Kiko can honor. Team Unruly noticed one of those interesting ironies while conducting research on this story. Seems that those who credited the existence of rubber rooms to protectionist unions can’t figure out why there is a teacher exodus out of New York. Weingarten tried to reframe the debate on the teacher retention issue to no avail . One conservative leaning website opened with an article bashing the bureaucratic expense of the rubber room and calling for quicker dismissal of bad teachers. That was followed with a second article trying to determine the cause of the mass exodus . Here’s a thought. Sending whistleblowers and vocal critics to a Brooklyn gulag might not be the best way to boost morale. You want teachers to stay? Quit making a stint as Saddam Hussein’s defense attorney a more attractive job than a career as a New York educator!

To tell you the truth, New York, the rubber room fiasco makes you stand out as the most corrupt and draconian school system in the United States. So, for fostering a culture of fear that led to the creation of a disturbingly arcane and vile punishment, for allowing rampant abuse of the rubber room to silence critics, for using the rubber room as a strong-arm tactic to force the union into bargaining away tenured teacher due process rights, for gratuitous totalitarianism at every administrative level, and for lacking the foresight to recognize how a demoralizing practice will cause new teachers to seek employment elsewhere, The Unruly Advocate proudly (sadly?) awards a Kiko to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Chancellor of Education Joel Klein, and the New York Department of Education. And may the only rubber you ever encounter, New York education autocrats, be the kind that prevents you from reproducing another generation of caustic petty tyrants.