Hastening the removal of the Incompetent

January 15, 2004

Good news! David Herszenhorn writes in New York Times today that, thanks to a new cooperation between the teachers' union and the city, failing teachers can be terminated quicker:

As part of a broad overhaul of the disciplinary process and evaluation system for teachers, the union president, Randi Weingarten, also called for ending so-called rubber rooms, where more than 200 teachers facing charges of malfeasance are sent to languish, some for years, while still receiving full pay.

Emphasis ours.

A rubber room looks just like a conference room, with tables and chairs, with bathrooms nearby and handy access to telephones and vending machines.

And there, incompetent teachers show up for work each day, until the day, years later, when they can be fired.

This blows our minds. How on earth could there be a system that routinely pays college-educated salaried professionals for two years to do absolutely nothing, all just to get them away from children? Yet we're sure that the teachers' union would claim that this is yet another one of those hard-fought rights hammered out at the bargaining table during yet another strike.

Something stinks. Fortunately, Weingarten appears to be a breath of fresh air:

"Yes, this is a union president who is going to talk about removing teachers who should not be teaching," Ms. Weingarten said in a breakfast speech to the Association for a Better New York. "And I do that without hesitation, because this a union that is not about just keeping people. We are about keeping qualified people."

It looks like this is a step in the right direction.

One problem with keeping qualified people in a profession where it seems the best and brightest leave all too quickly, is that it needs to be more of a profession! To get respect, the teaching profession needs to be more respectable. When bright, capable people see a system where it takes two years of abject incompetence just to build a case to get someone fired, how can anyone blame them for leaving for greener pastures!

As we've said before, it isn't about the behavior of the kids, it is about the behavior of the adults in charge. It seems in New York City, they're growing up a little.