Last August Steven Brill wrote a
New Yorker piece chronicling the “rubber rooms” in New York City, which housed teachers unable to find a job at a school and who accrued salary and pension benefits just for showing up, sometimes for years on end. Last month the city reached an
agreement with the United Federation of Teachers to close the rubber rooms. It turns out Brill was just warming up, because he has a new, long article appearing in the upcoming New York Times Magazine titled “
The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand.” For those who pay close attention to education reform, there are only a few new items (did you know that Jon Schnur, the co-founder of New Leaders for New Schools and an Obama Transition Team member, was responsible for coining “Race to the Top?”). For everyone else, it’s an excellent primer on the current intersection of politics and education.
Mostly, the article deserves a read for the people Brill spoke to and the way he asks them questions and deals with their responses. Here he is talking to Michael Mulgrew, the president of the UFT, about having the ability to fire employees:
Next to Mulgrew was his press aide, Richard Riley. “Suppose you decide that Riley is lazy or incompetent,” I asked Mulgrew. “Should you be able to fire him?”
“He’s not a teacher,” Mulgrew responded. “And I need to be able to pick my own person for a job like that.” Then he grinned, adding: “I know where you’re going, but you don’t understand. Teachers
