Why Is The City Paying 757 People To Do Nothing?

This NY Post article about the city's rubber rooms highlights the many problems with this awful system, but leaves a misleading impression that there are lots of great teachers there, being punished for minor infractions by vindictive principals.  This is total nonsense.  While I'm sure there are a tiny handful of teachers who have been unfairly accused or treated, the vast majority of teachers in these rubber rooms are incompetent bad apples who, in any sane system, would have simply been fired, but thanks to the union contract, it's almost impossible to do so.  The fact that the number of teachers in rubber rooms has more than doubled since March 2005 is actually great news, as it reflects Bloomberg and Klein's efforts to rid the city's classrooms of the very worst teachers.  Jeanne Allen has it exactly right:

Some say the teachers themselves are to blame - their union contract requires a hearing before any tenured employee can be fired.  

"The reason the rubber room exists is because of worn-out and, quite frankly, irrelevant union contracts that do more to protect people's jobs than they do to protect kids," said Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, based in Washington, D.C.

Adding to that issue is the fact that the 20 arbitrators who review cases meet, on average, five times a month, or twice a month in the summer, making for a painfully slow and inefficient system.  

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WHY IS THE CITY PAYING 757 PEOPLE TO DO NOTHING?
By ANGELA MONTEFINISE and MELISSA KLEIN
http://www.nypost.com/seven/09302007/news/regionalnews/why_is_the_city_paying_757_peo.htm
September 30, 2007

Just before 9 a.m., they file into large, sometimes windowless rooms.
In some cases, they punch time cards; in others, they scribble their names on a sign-in sheet.