Bouncing Around The Room

This week The New Yorker weighs in on school "reform" with Steven Brill's piece, "The Rubber Room". Inflammatorily subtitled, "The battle over New York City's worst teachers," the article treats its audience to a slice of the much-decried bureaucracy of teaching in the city, while more acutely making residents of the Temporary Reassignment Center (TRC) (a.k.a., the Rubber Room) look dumb. Like, really dumb.

“Before Bloomberg and Klein, everyone knew that an incompetent teacher would realize it and leave on their own,” pronounces Brandi Scheiner, the first individual Brill permits to wholly embarrass herself before a national readership of hundreds of thousands. It is hard to imagine how silly this must sound to anyone that has never met a dyed-in-the-wool union stalwart. Later, from an unnamed TRC denizen: “We can tell if we’re doing our jobs. We love these children.” I'm sure this comment resonates strongly with the lawyers, doctors, and private sector employees that have contracts relying heavily on their ability to self-evaluate. Brill's pièce de résistance, however, is his recounting of the story of "Patricia Adams", a pseudonym for a Rubber Room defendant who eventually returned to the job and was lionized by the UFT. “Bravo!,” reads the union website where she is described returning to work, and the reader is allowed perhaps a twinge of sympathy, until the truth is revealed: Ms. Adams was an alcoholic who was sent to the TRC for being found “'in an unconscious state' in her classroom," leaving 34 students unsupervised. Yes, drunk and asleep on the job. With tenure, one can only assume.

The Rubber Room was introduced to most non-teachers through an engaging and well-produced piece on Ira Glass's "This American Life". While Glass's treatment presented sob stories of teachers, lives thrown into turmoil through seemingly harsh accusations and the inhumane conditions of the TRC, Brill doesn't concern himself with such trivialities. The Rubber Room is an unquestionably necessary, if unfortunate, reality, as he posits, "The stated rationale for the reassignment centers is unassailable: Get these people away from children, even if tenure rules require that they continue to be paid." This is not all Brill presents as unassailable; at various points he deems due process as overly expensive and gratuitous, Obama's "Race To The Top" money as a necessary, coveted prize, and ATR teachers as lazy and unemployable.

Detailed presentations of teaching, particularly teaching in urban, low-income settings, are rare in high-profile publications like The New Yorker. As infrequent as they are, they are astoundingly important to the national discussion about education in America. The New Yorker's wealthy, liberal audience is a powerful force when it comes time to vote, donate money to non-profits and candidates, and generally weigh in on domestic policy. To present a view of New York City's teachers by focusing on the less than 1% that are so grossly incompetent as to be drunk on the job,to nickname a student "the enforcer" and put him in charge of discipline, and to make sweeping, nonsensical generalizations about teaching as a job that only requires loving children, is irresponsible.

In order to advance the cause of education for all in this country, we need high-circulation publications to present the real "battles" that confront high-poverty teachers: teaching deep concepts vs. teaching what's on the test, devoting 80 hours per week to give impoverished students the support they require vs. having a family and life outside of the workplace, charter schools vs. public schools, staying in an inner-city classroom for low pay vs. teaching in the suburbs for more, and the list goes on. So few in the non-teaching public have a true understanding of these issues, and yet they represent the truly important debates that need to be had.

Steven Brill presents a cogent, strong article that does let the public know about a process that is overly expensive and wasteful. Additionally, the UFT is rightly chastised for standing up for teachers that have no business being in the classroom. Unfortunately, too many people already believe that the majority, rather than the minority, of teachers have no business in the classroom, and this piece is only fueling that fire. Let's hope in the future The New Yorker and other publications will feature battles being fought by the best, rather than the worst, teachers in New York City.