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The Rubber Room
By Richard Nantel | March 13, 2008
National Public Radio recently aired an excellent This American Life episode called Human Resources. The first part of this documentary featured a story called “The Rubber Room,” which focused on a surreal situation in the NY City Public School System.
The rubber room is a place where hundreds of teachers facing disciplinary hearings for real, imagined, or fabricated offenses are sent to spend their days. They sit in this room drawing full salaries, at times for more than a year, waiting to have their cases heard and hoping to return to teaching assignments.
The rubber room does not bring out the best in people. Teachers become territorial, forbidding others from sitting in their chairs. Educators often divide themselves into ethnic groups, blacks in one area, Hispanics in another, whites somewhere else. Violence has broken out.
This is a terrible situation. Innocent teachers sent to the rubber room are soon demoralized, often becoming part of the 44 percent of teachers who quit their chosen profession after just a few years. Teachers who should be rightfully dismissed for incompetence or serious infractions remain on payroll, costing the school system $25 million per year.
What’s desperately needed is a way to quickly parse out the two groups, returning the good teachers to the classrooms while dismissing those that should never have been placed there in the first place. Having the parsing process drag on for years while teachers sit in “teacher prison” helps no one, least of all students desperately in need of skilled and motivated instructors.
You can download this podcast for 95 cents. This American Life makes its podcasts available for free for a one week period. So, you should consider subscribing to download a new episode each week. (Frankly, I would rate all This American Life podcasts as among the best content available on the Web.)
You can also find out more about this unfortunate situation at rubberroommovie.com and can view a trailer for a documentary film on the subject currently in production.
Topics: Academic, K-12, Learning |
March 13th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Thanks for posting this Richard. Very interesting. It’s so strange. I would never have thought American beauraucracy in the educational system would be so senseless, but I suppose it’s not overly surprising.
I’ve subscribed to “This American Life” and just listened to “Return to Childhood” - also very interesting. Thanks for introducing me to this.