On Demand
Rubber Room Rumpus
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Steve Brill, former publisher of Brill’s Content and author of an article in the August 31 issue of the New Yorker magazine critiques the "rubber room" and other NYC teachers union contract provisions.
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Children are not cogs in a machine or a product. How are we going to ensure that teachers are not being punished for things outside of their control? What about the effects of poverty, parental involvement, class size, etc? I don't think the union is perfect but the teachers aren't to blame either. As teachers, we talk about setting children up for success. But are teachers set up for success or failure by the system?
In many localities, school boards and school management represent local politics at it's dirtiest, most corrupt, and nepotistic, where a truly dedicated teacher is often treated as a nuisance by indifferent administration. Teachers like these are only protected by tenure, seniority, and unions. In many parts of the country this would mean teachers being fired for, say, teaching evolution in biology class. A teacher who fights for special ed for a needy student? Fired.
As a former teacher, mr. brill is 100% WRONG. A teacher has a student for 1 hour divided by 30 kids. The PARENT is responsible for a child's success.
From the point of view of fairness and justice, the problem with evaluating teachers is "HOW?" Principals are extremely subjective and prone to cronyism and favoritism. Test results penalize teachers who work with the most challenging students.
I would consider teaching math/physics but I couldn't stand the laziness and incompetence of my would-be colleagues.
I believe 100% that it is the teachers responsibilty that student assign to them are capable of achieving at least standards, not achieving this should result in failure for the teacher fully and should be act upon, just like when you are not performing well at a regular job they get rid of you
Talking about teachers in isolation of the social context that they teach in is the misdirection that politicians and pundits regularly employ to avoid the real issues, i.e. urban poverty, economic segregation, lack of health needs being met, and our failing community institutions. Those problems have to be engaged, incompetent teachers are the least of our problems.
what on earth i Brill talking about? teaching is a collective enterprise, not an entrepreneurial one. It is imaginary to think that somehow magicians will appear and deserve high (combat?) pay? Every word out of his mouth so far is an imaginary narrative and was used already in the 80s by those against all teachers, including university teachers.
But in fact it is all about the money... reward teachers better, pay for supplies etc, and the quality of those entering the professional will improve.
There should be professional teacher evaluations, and i believe there are... aren't there?
I am even suspicious of Arne Duncan and Joel klein... The aim is to produce a new workforce, not new citizens. Ergo, teach to the performance test. And measure teachers by their willingness to be that narrow?
Looking forward to a life "clogged" with mediocre teachers? What is the point of all of this scare mongering, one wonders?
Brian is doing an excellent job of questioning.
One needs to separate "incompetence" from "unmotivated", resulting from the prevailing system backward incentives. With all the chest pounding these days about socialized medicine being 'communist', I can think of no greater enclave of 'communism' (lifetime employment, advancement based solely on seniority, etc, etc, etc) that is already encamped in the present day academic sector.
A teacher only influences a child for 1 hour divided by 30 kids. Mr. Brill is rating the wrong data. Parents are the leading indicator of child success.
I know of a number of teachers in high needs districts who try to do more/better by their students and and up ostracized by their colleagues (fellow teachers) who follow the safe and comfortable path of mediocrity. There is a desperate need to change the culture there.
Last year, the New Yorker had an interesting article on the challenge inherent in idenifying good teachers - comparing it to choosing draft picks from college football for the NFL.
It did bring up an interesting point - successful coaching motivates. How are coaches reviewed and rewarded, beyond the score board?
We MUST streamline the review process, which the NYer article terms "endless", so teachers do not spend YEARS getting paid while doing nothing in the "rubber room". Due process for the teachers cannot truly require a years-long procedural morass.
Brill's article also highlights another problem in the public arena and that is the role of arbitration in public disputes. Brill outlines the problems in education where arbitration takes longer than criminal trials but the same issues arise in other public employment areas specifically in police/fire arbitration in NJ. One of the reasons for the increase in property taxes is the failure of arbitrators to be responsive and responsible instead of beholding to the public unions. Most tax increases involve salaries to a large degree but I will bet that in this economic decline arbitrators are still granting 3 or 4% increases in Jersey
As a former teacher whose significant other is a current teacher in the NYC system, the greatest protection for incompetent teachers in the NYC system is the competence of the school supervisors, principals and assistant principals. The current system provides financial incentives for supervisors so that corrupt teachers who will help their students cheat (by teaching the specific standardized test materials the week before the test, and in tests where the teacher grades their own students, like the oral part of a foreign language) are more valuable to the supervisors than honest, hardworking teachers whose students succeed or fail on the work they do.
I ask again: What is the AIM of this critique?
To demonize teachers? In his opinion, the vast majority of teachers are bad actors?
Really, what's up? I think it just comes down to destroying union protections, and that is unlikely to be the best solution.
Incompetent teachers are only half the problem, there are also incompetent parents that need to be more part of the process instead of treating learning and schools like daycare - On the other hand, the rubber room process also needs to be reformed. I have a an acquaintance who's been wrongly placed in a rubber room, and hasn't had opportunity for redress for over a year. Some teachers are intentionally accused by students as revenge against a grade or disciplinary actions taken by teachers against students.
Mike from Manhattan is 100 percent correct.
#7 Myra. Why? Because a teacher can read with a 3rd grade child at night? Because a teacher can take a child grocery shopping or count buses on the street with a child? No, no, and no. The fact is: teachers weren't better in the past. Parents were. What do you have to say to that?
I am a high school teacher in the Bronx; teaching for ten years. While I agree with the guest that there should be greater differentiation between unsatisfactory and satisfactory ratings, I disagree that teachers and their performance are the major reason why students are not performing. The working conditions, the quality of students (their abilities not their backgrounds) and what it takes to engage and move this population require superhuman capabilities. Students that are better prepared at home make the perfect starting point for measuring the effectiveness of a teacher's performance.
Of course teachers should be held accountable for their performance, but when getting rid of tenure we shouldn't make the mistake of going too far in the other direction. Performance related pay is most effective in environments where significant financial reward compensates for working in a highly competitive work environment. The rewards of teaching are not just monetary, and an environment where teachers constantly feel under pressure would not be conducive to good teaching. Relatively small increases in pay for better teachers will not be sufficient to attract the best talent into the classroom if the trade off is constant assessment.
Audrey from the Bronx and Artista from Green point . Right on point.
The fact that Mr. Brill advocates a "carrot and stick" approach to teacher evaluation suggests to me that he knows very little about what really goes on in our public schools. He suggests that students' standardized test scores would only be "part" of the evaluation process, but this is unlikely. Principals and other administrators are absolutely fixated on this data already. Obviously, tenure should never be automatic. And teachers should be required to demonstrate ongoing competency in their subject areas. But to evaluate teachers based on the test performance of their students is illogical, intellectually dishonest, and harmful to the relationships teachers work so hard to build with their students.
do NYC teachers even have the tools for success?
It is crazy to keep teachers in a rubber room for years.
What did Mike Bloomberg and Mr.Klein do about this during the Mayoral Control years?
They have dismanteled the well-functioning 3-members special education evaluation teams almost overnight and reduced the evaluations to meaningless paper-pushing jobs. As a result, many of the most qualified teachers and clinicians have retired in droves over the past few years.
Mr.Bloomberg left the rubber room lingering. Whose fault is that with his control?
Instead of knocking again the teachers and the Union, Mr.Brill should direct his quest towards an independent evaluation regarding the progress in public schools, the claim to fame of Mr.Bloomberg, before the election
I would also like to point out that thousands of subpar workers are kept on at non-unionized companies (especially the large ones) indefinitely.
I think we've all worked at many many companies where the staff is riddled with incompetent people. How come no one ever writes articles about them? The fact is, it's hard to fire anybody: finding and communicating the reasons, finding a replacement, knowledge transfer, etc
Teachers remain in the "rubber room" too long because the DOE has a limited number of arbitrators hearing the cases, and as I understand it, they only work 5 days a month. That's the problem, not the fact that teachers have due process rights.
Second, the incentive for teachers to do a good job, not just an okay job, is that we care about our students! It is insulting to suggest that we are not already giving our students our best efforts and that if we only got a few thousand dollars in merit pay, we'd step it up. That's not to say that money doesn't matter at all - Certainly students would benefit if salaries were raised to the point that new teachers didn't have to work second jobs and good teachers could remain in the profession instead of leaving after a few years because they can't support their families. But people who are motivated solely by money don't tend to become teachers in the first place.
Finally, we are jumping the gun when we talk about judging teachers by their students' test scores. Absolutely, teachers bear a great deal of the responsibility for the progress that their students do or don't make, and we should be judged on our results, but at this point the tests we have in New York just don't measure that very well. They were designed to measure how well students perform on grade-level standards, not how much progress a student who begins the year above or below grade level makes during the year. (For example, an 8th grade student who begins the year way below grade level, and over the course of 8th grade finally learns 5th and 6th grade math has made huge progress, but it's not going to show up on the test because the test focuses on 8th grade standards.) It may be possible to design a better test, but it is not fair to students or teachers to use the current tests for a purpose for which they were not designed.
Whenever the powerful (Bloomberg and Klein) decides to round up a large group of people, the portraited villains (the rubber room teachers) are more often than not the hapless victims caught up like the pawns in a giant chess game. Brill's article in NYer is nothing but another move on the chessboard.
It looks familiar to the intern camp for Japanese Americans and various anti-black rumpus in the South in our history, even of a much smaller scale. Teachers are the last reason why the urban schools are in such a poor state, teachers are just a convenient target and scapegoat.
It completely defies reason to charge a teacher being incompetence after her 25 years satisfactory services, and to charge a teacher as the threat to children for raising her voice in a rowdy classroom.
Brill and Lehrer fail to recognize or discuss the fact that teacher tenure is a property and liberty right under the United States Constitution as declared by the U.S. Supreme Court. We have due process rights which were won with blood, sweat and tears by labor unionists for decades. I am in a reasignment center, not by my own choosing.
I do not want to be paid to do nothing and I was never even accused of being incompetent or endangering a child. I am disabled and the City of New York under the Bloomberg/Klein corporate model seeks to ignore not only the U.S. Constitution but the Americans with Disabilities Act and the NY State Human Rights Laws.
We teachers are proud of our work and we want to work! Incidentally, you and Brill consistently fail to mention that most of those of us in the Rubber Rooms are Black and Latino educators! Remember the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause? Brill came to my center which is over 75% of us are Black and Latino and he did not seem to notice or care!
Yes, I want to teach! and YES I WANT TO WORK for a living and I care deeply about the future of our city, the students who I teach!
Fruthermore, Brian Lehrer, on your radio program with Mr. Brill you mentioned the late Frank McCorut who won a pulitzer prize for "Angela's Ashes" but you obviously did not read his book "Teacher Man" in which he describes being fired and harassed by administrators. Although you mention MacCourt as an exambple of an excellent teacher, he was fired and would have ended up in a rubber room if they had existed when he began teaching in the 1950s. McCourt was never given the recognition by the City of new York as a teacher that he deserved and only received it from the world AFTER he left teaching. He would have been seen by Brill as mediocore. Brill is wrong.
Yes, it takes about 2 years for a reassigned teacher to go through the various steps of the hearing, but the tempo is controlled by DOE, not by the rubber room teachers. A powerful mayor who brushed away term limits, certainly is able to accelerate the hearing process if he wants to.
The slow pace of the rubber room hearing might be something done on purpose by the City and DOE to kill any potential lawsuit by teachers as the statue of limitations for civil rights lawsuits is limited to 300 days, which easily slip away while teachers languish waiting their 3020a hearing.
Al,
The placement in the "rubber room" is an ongoing civil rights violation and the statute of limitations would not begin running while the educator (teacher, principal or teachers assistant, etc.) is in the rubber room. The only reason the hearings take so long is that Bloomberg and Klein can use the length of time as a political weapon while all the time neglecting to mention the hearings are a constitutionally protected right and the lives of people's families is on the line. A head of a household loses his or her job and it may mean homelessness or worse. Not a concern for Bloomberg who was worth about $3 billion when he began as mayor and is now worth well over $16 billion, the wealthiest man in New York. By the way, did you know that Eliot Spitzer scored a perfect 100% on his LSAT exam to enter law school...what does that tell us about the worth of test scores?
Chancellor Klein has based much of his curriculum on theories he's learned from books, and from management theorists, such as William Ouchi, a professor of management at UCLA. Meanwhile, he's training the principals to be better managers, not necessarily better principals, at the new Leadership Academy. A teacher leaving the school system wrote in the Daily News recently, "The principal of the school where I taught for two and a half years tries to run the school like a business. He has been using trial and error and sometimes riding his own impulsive whims to figure out what works. He was trained in the Leadership Academy. I am suspicious of whether this academy can successfully prepare people with little teaching experience." I'm suspicious too.
So, when a teacher is being evaluated for competence, who is doing the evaluating, and what are they evaluating? Is it their adherence to the one-size-fits-all curriculum laid down by the theorists, or their teaching skills? It's curious that so many teachers in the Rubber Rooms judged incompetent are older teachers. They're used to a less regimented syle of teaching. Their removal allows the principals to hire younger teachers who are paid less and adapt easily to the new curriculum since they don't know anything else.
Brill, like Klein, has a business mans point of view. That point of view is blind in one eye. It's the eye that includes the teachers, the reality of the classrooms, and yes, the children as children, and not part of some managerial theory.
I was a celebrated educator- I won top awards in education and my practice was studied and praised by The New Standards researchers. As I approached longevity, I was accused by a child of cursing her in class, something that an immediate investigation AT THE SITE, as per my contract would have proved as false. The union rep, at my school helped the parent by advising her to skip the principal and call the Chancellor, so I would be immediately removed, before I could prove that her child had ulterior motives for wanting me removed, AND THAT THERE WERE 30 STUDENTS WHO KNEW IT NEVER HAPPENED.
, Her 'fear' at my statements in front of a class of thirty kids, was illegally interpreted as 'corporal punishment, which my attorney pointed out, it was not. The union rep at the site not only was COMPLICIT, she actively spread lies about me, and had a personal agenda. The Manhattan rep, ignored my phone calls . no grievances were filed. The superintendent of the district published a letter saying that I was found guilty of corporal punishment. I never had a hearing. I never even heard the allegations, except from student and parent email that reported what the child and MY UFT rep were saying. I sat in the rubber room for six months knowing nothing. My pleas fell on the deaf ears of the UFT. The harassment and threat of the rubber room was permitted by the union, which at the site, dId little to solve the problem, when the principal wants a teacher out. Union reps are teachers who depend on the principal for everything from students load ,materials, schedule, program ,duties etc. No matter what Weingarten says, the UFT was complicit for two decades, and the numbers tell the story, while the media continues to babble about bad teachers.
ry would permit such cockamamie procedures.
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