Rubber Rooms

This article in this week’s The New Yorker reveals what happens to New York City teachers accused of misconduct or incompetence. Because of a union contract clause that requires they receive full salaries and benefits until their charges have been heard by an arbitrator (a process that typically takes years), these teachers end up together in a sort of a detention room (dubbed the Rubber Room) for seven hours a day, five days a week, playing board games and reading newspapers. The cost to city taxpayers probably approaches one hundred million dollars a year. In Canada, there are no rubber rooms (that we know of), but accused teachers are typically “re-assigned to administrative duties” at board headquarters until the charges have been resolved. It would probably take a forensic audit to discover how productive these administrative duties actually are.

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