Ending the rubber room backlog by December looks impossible
Mayor Bloomberg and UFT President Michael Mulgrew got a lot of applause when they vowed to shut down the city’s infamous “rubber rooms” by December. But that might be an impossible goal.
The trouble hinges on the fact that the city has not ended the practice of granting a trial to all teachers accused of incompetence or misconduct. It has simply decided to speed up those trials, which take place in a lower Manhattan office building across from Tweed Courthouse, presided over by paid attorneys called arbitrators who act as judge and jury.
To speed up the trials, the city has promised to nearly double the number of arbitrators starting in September, and also to increase the number of days they work on teacher cases each month to seven from five. By doing this, the city and the union claim, all of the nearly 650 teachers still waiting for a verdict will get one by December.
But a GothamSchools analysis shows that, to meet this goal, the city will have to force arbitrators to cram multiple hearings into each working day — a rate that is now unprecedented.
Even this scenario requires the city to somehow use the summer months to clear all the cases of the nearly 300
The trouble hinges on the fact that the city has not ended the practice of granting a trial to all teachers accused of incompetence or misconduct. It has simply decided to speed up those trials, which take place in a lower Manhattan office building across from Tweed Courthouse, presided over by paid attorneys called arbitrators who act as judge and jury.
To speed up the trials, the city has promised to nearly double the number of arbitrators starting in September, and also to increase the number of days they work on teacher cases each month to seven from five. By doing this, the city and the union claim, all of the nearly 650 teachers still waiting for a verdict will get one by December.
But a GothamSchools analysis shows that, to meet this goal, the city will have to force arbitrators to cram multiple hearings into each working day — a rate that is now unprecedented.
Even this scenario requires the city to somehow use the summer months to clear all the cases of the nearly 300
A school day in East New York: bright students, bored restless
Where can you find the most bored children in New York?
Last week I visited P.S. 13 in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn, a school where you would expect to see some anxiety before the high-stakes English exam that will be given next Monday. Instead, I met a cast of bright and precocious students plodding through test prep worksheets with little supervision.
P.S. 13 has been a troubled school for years though its last city-issued progress report calls it a “B” school. In 2004, it managed to remove itself from the state’s list of school at risk of being closed, but it’s now in danger