Would You Defend THESE Teachers?

Steve Brill writes at reuters.com about the "Rubber Rooms" in which New York stashes teachers who have been removed from the classroom pending arbitration of complaints about their performance. How to know whom to believe?

I could read the thousands of pages of testimony offered by both sides in their arbitration hearings to develop an objective view of whether the charges of incompetence made sense. That made all the difference. For example, would you want someone teaching your kids if her lawyer hours contesting the evidence of whether she had actually ever had custody of her teachers’ manual, which was her defense to the charge that she hadn’t prepared lesson plans, graded papers, or set up her classroom properly? Or, would you want your son or daughter being taught by a teacher whose defense for appointing the biggest kid in her class as the “enforcer” to keep the other children in line was that she was teaching “self-governance”?

In another case, trumpeted on the website of the United Federation of Teachers as an example of school officials targeting a terrific teacher simply because she was a high-salary veteran, the record – which was uncontested by the teacher’s own lawyer – showed that she had been found passed out dead drunk in front of her high school history students.

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The minute I saw these people sleeping, playing board games, chatting, or — in the case of a cheerful, $85,000 a year former middle school teacher — lounging in a beach chair she had brought from home, the story seemed obvious. As schools chancellor Joel Klein and his staff had argued, the Rubber Room was a symbol of a system gone haywire.

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