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Data released by the Department of Education today.

The city gave a glimpse today into the results of its new sped-up process for terminating teachers, the one that the Bloomberg administration said would put an end to the teacher holding pens known as rubber rooms.

The rubber rooms are technically gone; now, most teachers charged of incompetence or misconduct await verdicts in real schools and do administrative work. But the city failed to meet its goal of erasing the “backlog” of teachers who had been removed from their classrooms by the beginning of this calendar year. Roughly 11 percent of the teachers who made up the backlog — 83 out of 744 — are still waiting for their cases to wrap up.

Of those who have completed the process, nearly two-thirds of the teachers charged with misconduct or incompetence have returned to their classes, according to data released today by the Department of Education. Some were cleared of charges; others were fined or assigned additional training or counseling.

Roughly a quarter of those who began the termination proceedings are no longer in schools. Some were fired, and others either were forced to retire or resign.

The new numbers come at a time of heightened tension between the city and its teachers union over how to identify bad teachers and remove them from classrooms. (more…)

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. (more…)

When he announced that he would close the city’s infamous rubber rooms yesterday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared, “To say that this is a big deal is an understatement.”

The agreement will shutter the reassignment centers where teachers accused of misconduct or incompetence wait idly for their cases to be heard, a process both the city and union have accused each other of dragging on interminably. But the deal, which was struck outside of formal contract negotiations, does little to resolve the most contentious issues the city and union have long fought over.

Yesterday’s rubber room agreement traded one largely-ignored time-line for hearing cases for a speedier one. Union and city officials pledged to strictly adhere to the faster schedule and clear out the backlog of cases by the end of the year.

“We want a faster, fairer process,” United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said. “That’s the way this process should work and that’s what this agreement does.”

The deal does little to make it easier to fire teachers for incompetence, a major goal of the Bloomberg administration that the union bitterly opposes.  Nor does it address a costlier problem: the pool of teachers who remain on the city’s payroll after losing their positions to school budget cuts or school closings. (more…)

Among the contracts and school siting proposals on the agenda for last night’s school board meeting, one unusual item stood out — an “inquest on employee termination.”

The ominous event occurred behind closed doors before the public meeting, and officials would not say whose case was being heard. But they did explain that an inquest is one way for a teacher accused of incompetence or misconduct to be tried. The more common path is through a hearing before an arbitrator. An inquest is what happens if the teacher doesn’t request a hearing within 10 days of being charged.

During an inquest, a Department of Education attorney presents the city’s case to panel members, who come back with a final decision within a few weeks, said Claude Hersh, a lawyer with the state teachers union. Hersh said teachers or other pedagogical staff members under inquest do not have union lawyers representing them. 

I didn’t receive a comment yet from school officials about the inquest process. But Hersh described it as an easy win for the city, which presents its case to a school board made up mostly of mayoral appointees. “The determination is always termination of employment,” Hersh said. (more…)

Department of Education and teachers union officials could have a deal within weeks that would shrink the number of teachers sitting in rubber rooms.

Sources within the United Federation of Teachers said that the two sides have been negotiating for several weeks outside of contract talks, which have stalled, but would not give any specifics about how the population of teachers in the rooms might be reduced.

The rubber rooms, technically called “reassignment centers,” are student-less classrooms where about 650 teachers and administrators accused of misconduct or incompetence report for duty every day as they wait to be officially charged or have their cases heard. The wait can sometimes stretch over years, during which teachers receive their full salaries. According to Chancellor Joel Klein, last year the city spent some $30 million covering these teachers’ salaries. (more…)

With mayoral control set to expire in just 15 hours, some are developing contingency plans. Others are planning to party.

A group is planning to celebrate the end of mayoral control with a party in the park next to the Department of Education’s Manhattan headquarters, beginning at the perhaps-premature hour of 4:30 p.m. The law does not expire until midnight.

The event’s organizer, Nicola DeMarco, told me he expects between 25 and 50 people to join him at the party, which will conclude at midnight when the group tries to symbolically evict Schools Chancellor Joel Klein from Tweed Courthouse.

DeMarco has been teaching in the city since 1994 and is currently assigned to a teacher reassignment center, sometimes called “the rubber room.” He said the main point of the event is for teachers and parents to share their experiences living under mayoral control. “We’ve all been impacted by the scorch-and-burn policy to raise test scores,” he said.

Below is the press announcement that I received (from multiple people) yesterday: (more…)

City school officials are fond of complaining about the holding pens where teachers who are either unable to find jobs in the system or who are accused of incompetence sit, receiving full pay but not working, sometimes for as long as three years. I’ve often heard critics say that these pens, known as the rubber rooms and the Absent Teacher Reserve, would never be tolerated in any other industry.

Except, apparently, the American auto industry.

Here’s part of a recent New Yorker story about Detroit’s collapse that caught my eye (transcribed and emphasized by me, rather than cut and paste, because the magazine doesn’t make that possible):

The situation that Corker referred to was the industry’s infamous ‘jobs bank’ program, which dated back to an agreement that G.M. had made with its workers in 1984. … The U.A.W., sensing potential job losses, won a contract provision designed to discourage layoffs: displaced workers were shifted to a jobs bank, drawing full benefits and nearly full pay. They were not obliged to seek other jobs, and, as the Detroit News reported a few years ago, many of them spent their days working on crossword puzzles at the local union hall.

Obviously, this isn’t a perfect comparison, since, in schools, it can be a very tricky thing to figure out which workers to keep and which to lay off. While some teachers inside the rubber rooms are probably truly incompetent, others could be — as teachers union activists will say — innocent victims of principal harassment.

Here’s a reproduction of the original Detroit News story.