Sunday 30 August 2009

Rubber Rooms

I've heard of rubber rooms (places where teachers wait to see if they will be allowed back into the classroom) before. Although they aren't called "rubber rooms" in Los Angeles, there are teachers (I know at least one) who are sent to school district office buildings (every school day from 8 to 3) while they are being investigated.

I see the purpose of these rooms, accusations of abuse need to be taken seriously and the teacher must be away from students while the investigation takes place. But, what is unacceptable is the fact that teachers spend years in the so called rubber rooms. Furthermore, if (tenured) teachers who commit crimes are entitled to these benefits, what about teachers who are merely incompetent?

This week's New Yorker had a great article on Rubber Rooms. Author Steve Brill's main points are:

1. Cases involving teachers in the rubber room accused of "incompetence" take "forty to forty five days-eight times as long as the average criminal trial in the United States."
2. Clearly, bad teachers need to be removed. A study from the Brookings Institute found that "having a top-quartile teacher four years in a row would be enough to close the Black-white test score gap."
3. Teacher tenure is a huge problem because the majority of teachers get it. It is almost impossible to be labeled "unsatisfactory." Almost all teachers are rated "good or great," only about one percent of tenured teachers were labeled "unsatisfactory." One education reformer argued that this is "ridiculous...if you look at the upper quartile and the lower quartile, you know those people are not interchangeable."
4. To solve this problem President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan propose to financially reward schools and teachers for raising test scores. If the districts and the union don't want to hold teachers accountable (they don't-they've pushed laws against using test scores to evaluate teachers), they will miss out on millions of dollars.

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