Rubber Rooms & The Dance of the Lemons

What if your child was taught the same lesson over and over, eight times in fact, by a teacher called “Mars”?   What if you found out the principal had reported Mars to the local education authorities, noting: "He just didn't teach. He did the same thing every day. He confronted kids and pushed them out of the classroom. We wrote him up, and wrote him up, until one day he pushed a kid out of the class" and down some steps.  

You’d think this teacher would be fired, wouldn’t you?  But you’d be wrong.

In fact, the incompetent Mars, a teacher in Los Angeles, is very much alive and kicking.  He currently serves as a substitute teacher. That’s after being paid $40,000 to quit in March, 2005, according to a story by Beth Barrett which appeared in the Feb.11th edition of LA Weekly.

You see, Mars was pushed from school to school, six in all, in what is known as the "dance of the lemons," a term that describes the LA school district’s attempt to cope with tenured teachers who can't teach but, under the current system, cannot be fired.  This leads to the ridiculous practice of LA not only paying teachers to leave, but the even more controversial practice of transferring bad teachers to other, unsuspecting schools, sometimes harming the educations of thousands of children.

New York City has a more direct approach, as reported in an August, 2009, article by Steven Brill in The New Yorker magazine.   There, the school district employs eight lawyers whose sole job is to remove bad teachers.  These underperforming teachers are then placed in what is officially called a Temporary Reassignment Center but which everyone calls "rubber rooms" — offices well away from children, where they earn full salary to do nothing during their job disputes.

Why does this happen?

The answer lies in the tale of these two cities – New York City (NYC) and Los Angeles (LA) -- and their battle to fire their worst teachers.  With over one million students in 1600 schools, NYC is the biggest public school system in the world; LA, with 617,000 and 885 schools, is the second largest public school system in the States. 

It has to be said that if you’re one of the 80,000 teachers in New York City or the 33,000 teachers in Los Angeles, you have one of the world’s tougher teaching assignments. 

In Los Angeles, nearly 70% of the students are “economically disadvantaged,” a group that is traditionally known for being at-risk for poor educational outcomes. 

About 40 percent of NYC’s students speak a language other than English at home -- hardly surprising given that one-third of all New Yorkers were born in another country.  The city translates school reports into Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Urdu, Persian, Hindi, Russian, Bengali, Haitian Creole, Korean and Arabic.

(The challenges of teaching in NYC public schools are not just cultural, they’re caloric as well: another 40% of NYC’s students are obese so in October, 2009, school bake sales were banned.)

Teaching, like every profession, has its duds.   Not every teacher who starts working in a classroom should stay there.  There are teachers who cannot control a class, who cannot gain the respect of their students, whose competence does not lie in the realm of helping children to learn.

But such are the powers of the teaching unions in Los Angeles and New York City that it’s prohibitively expensive, if not downright impossible, to fire the worst teachers.  Incredibly, in the last ten years, LA education officials spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven teachers for poor classroom performance.  During legal struggles that typically took five years, only four teachers were actually fired. The average cost of each battle is $500,000.   In NYC the cost is usually a bit less, around $400,000.

This is not to say that teachers’ unions have not served a vital purpose.  Before the founding of NYC’s powerful United Federation of Teachers, the U.F. T., in 1960, teachers earned a pittance, they bowed before all-powerful principals and the mostly female workforce was subjected to harsh rules such as one which required pregnant women to take a two-year unpaid leave.  The California Teachers Association has promoted the interests of its members in a similar fashion.

But, in LA and NYC at least, the balance has certainly tipped in favour of protecting incompetent teachers at the expense of their students. 

As Steve Brill reported, the U.F.T’s website has a section that features stories highlighting the injustice of the Rubber Rooms. One, which begins “Bravo!” celebrated the case of a “vindicated” teacher, who the union said was persecuted by a principal who wanted to get rid of senior teachers. 

The sad truth was that she’d passed out drunk in her classroom.  After cutting a deal to return on condition she stayed sober, she again passed out drunk and was fired.   The teacher in question asked that the story be immediately removed from the U.F. T. website. She says she is now sober and starting a school for recovering teen-age substance abusers.

Andrew Taylor is the Principal of the Maru-a-Pula School in Gaborone, Botswana.  His email address is: principal.map@gmail.com.  Maru-a-Pula’s website is: www.maruapula.org