THE RUBBER ROOM OR THE DOE'S GULAG FOR OUTSPOKEN TEACHERS, WHISTLEBLOWERS, OVER-FORTY TEACHERS, ETC.
False accusations of verbal abuse, corporal punishment, incompetence, etc. against teachers, have been taking away the dignity, and the livelihood in many instances, of hundred of them .They vegetate in the rubber room and wait for months or even years before knowing the specifics of allegations made against them. The ignoble practice allows incompetent administrators to feed and manipulate the public's apprehension and distract attention from their own failure. The moral usurpation is all the more striking, because the very principals, incapable of inspiring children morally or intellectually, the very individuals who have been presiding over the failure of their schools years after years, are using children, in all impunity, to frame, or retaliate against, teachers. Here is a despicable example of false accusations : I was suspended on December 7, 2004, for "conduct unbecoming your position". What conduct ? I learned that two years and a half later, in May 2007. In other words I did not know the allegations , much less my accusers, except one cited by the " investigator". The hearings on my case, started in February 2008, were disrupted by the lawsuit we, Teachers4Action, filed in federal Court against both the DOE and the UFT, our own union, a nest of parasites who betray their fiduciary obligations.
The OSI's investigator, Robert Colon, interviewed me in April 2005 :
--Your students said you abused them verbally : you called them stupid, retarded, they amounted to nothing...What do you have to say ?
-- I have nothing to say. I do not deal in wholesale accusations made by faceless accusers. Please be specific.
-- Are you saying, all these students are lying ?
-- I am not saying True or False : it is simply meaningless to me until you identify someone who claim I abused them.
-- OK. Do you know D.D. ?
--- I do.
-- He said you called him retarded.
I did not know whether to laugh or cry. This was a case of the tail waggling the dog. I immediately pulled out four incident reports from my bag and handed them in. On the 11/01 report you can see the use of the word "retarded", and by whom. Yvonne Adonai, A.P., math department, was harassing me in a coordinated manner with Michael Wiltshire, the principal : they ignored the reports, and, worse, have the audacity to file an abuse complaint on behalf of the student. This is not an aberration : thousands of teachers, yes thousands, are daily subjected to similar indignities, with no recourse. The elaborate Discipline Code issued by the DOE is purely decorative -- frankly, a farce.
I talked to D.D.'s mother once : she was supportive but incapable to control her child.
What crime was I accused of exactly ? Please, read Robert Colon's report to find out.
To worsen a work environment already hostile, a guidebook "drafted by the department's Labor Division and sent to principals, provides a step-by-step outline for rating teachers unsatisfactory, firing tenured teachers and school aides and preventing administrators' decisions from being overruled by a judge." New York Post 11/16/04
Abuse allegations run from the frivolous to the hilarious to the delirious to the abject :
- David Pakter, a white teacher, The Teacher of the Year, is languishing in the rubber room for denouncing his principal's discriminatory practice against black kids : click here for more.
- The allegations made against a science teacher at Erasmus Hall High School For Business & Technology were breathtaking : he was accused of favoring the
big-breasted female students when grading ! I am puzzled : If the mere sight of big breasts were gratifying to me, did I have to reward the owners with big grades ? The abject accusation speaks volume about those who pursued it. Only the principal, Myrna Walters, was surprised that my colleague was totally exonerated and sent back to the school.
- Let Lenny Brown, a physics teacher, tell himself his story.
- A teacher has been sent to the rubber room since 3/05 for allegedly calling the principal of Prospect Height High School incompetent; she subsequently claimed, he said, that he threatened her as well. And yet, his characterization is accurate : among the depressing stories about the school he told me, one stood out : in September 2003, the school programming was so bad that new programs were issued both to students and teachers three weeks into the semester : in effect the three weeks were wasted . Where is the accountability trumpeted by the new DOE's administration ?
- A suspended chemistry teacher was accused of calling students "sweetheart" or "honey", which was deemed "at the borderline of sexual harassment", according to the investigator, my colleague said. He has been receiving supporting phone calls from parents, highly annoyed by the whole affair. Incompetent, revengeful administrators made a mountain of a mole-hill of where simple admonishment would do. Students are ultimately the victims : the replacement teacher cannot hold a candle to the abused one.
- Speaking of sex, prior to the current case, I was accused of making a sexual statement to a disruptive student -- who drew her tongue at me as she was leaving the classroom without permission -- for saying to her : "You think, you're cute ?" More of this later.
- " P.S. 147 Teacher Kathy Blythe says she has been falsely accused of roughing up a student, and as a result has been sitting in the Brooklyn 'rubber room' for the past two months[2/07-3/07].When veteran Teacher Kathy Blythe escorted a 9-year-old girl to her seat after she tried to run out of her classroom at P.S. 147 in Brooklyn for the third time that day, she had no idea that just a few hours later police officers would be escorting her to a cell in the 90th Precinct..." (cont'd)
- " A little over a week ago I got a chilling phone call. It was from a former colleague who taught across the hall from me for a decade. That day (Thurs, Feb., 15 2007) she was arrested and taken from her school in handcuffs based on a bogus charge made by a parent. She was not told the reason or told her rights. Most egregious was the actions of the school administrators...."(cont'd)
In his memoirs, New York City former chancellor Joseph Fernandez remembers Bobby Wagner, President of the Board of Education, telling him in October 1989, that " the majority of New York's principals were 'mediocre' and a significant number – as many as 25 percent – were 'incompetent'. He said that openly, not just to me.”( Joseph Fernandez , Tales Out Of School , Little Brown and Company, 1993. ) That was in the 1990's : the situation has not gotten better.
We are witnessing a paradox : "As many as 150 of the city's worst principals could get the boot this year in an unprecedented plan to fire the most lackluster leaders.(...) With more than a quarter of the city's 1,200 schools on the state's list of failures, Klein and his team see inexperienced and incompetent principals as the biggest roadblock to reform" (Daily News, 11/ 3/2002) ; and yet, putting the cart before the horse, the DOE's priority is empowering principals -- power of hiring and firing teachers, control over budget,etc. How could you implement merit pay , the latest edu buzzword, when so many supervisors are incompetent ? Can the Leadership Academy meet the DOE's need for principals, qualitatively and quantitatively ? Hardly : "Mr. Bloomberg's plan created a privately funded Leadership Academy to recruit and train new principals. The academy launched a highly publicized nationwide search for experienced principals. Philanthropies and businesses underwrote the academy at a cost of $25 million per year for three years. The first-year results have been disappointing.
Only one out-of-town principal was recruited. The first class of 90 trainees yielded 65 new principals, making this possibly the most expensive training program in history. "( Diane Ravitch , author and historian).
Three of the four principals at the small high schools that opened in September 2004 in the Thomas Jefferson High School building in Brooklyn were dismissed or forced to retire before November : "When you have to replace, as we do, 300 principals a year, there are going to be some bad ones ."( Chancellor Joel Klein).
MODUS OPERANDI OF THE RUBBER ROOM AS A FISCAL TOOL
UNDER JOEL KLEIN'S ADMINISTRATION
Chancellor Klein's legacy will irremediably be tainted with age discrimination against tenured teachers, and the violation of their constitutional rights -- the grounds for the lawsuit, we , Teachers4Action, filed against the DOE in federal court.
Why fiscal tool ? Fire two tenured teachers enjoying top salaries, and hire two non-tenured, malleable new teachers -- most of them, incidentally, will never be granted tenure. How do you fire a competent tenured teacher who did nothing wrong ? Well, there is no other way other than breaking the law, and circumventing the legal safeguard that protects him, as we demonstrate in the federal court. Chancellor Klein managed to eviscerate teacher tenure through collective bargaining, with the complicity of Randi Weingarten, the UFT President, which explains why she, as an individual, in addition to the union as a legal entity, are part of the lawsuit as defendants. In 2004, principals are instructed to follow the infamous guide mentioned earlier, to send tenured teachers to the rubber room purgatory on false allegations, or incompetence. The latest egregious example : On 1/15/08, math teacher Florian Lewenstein -- recently released from the rubber room with no formal charges leveled against him -- wrote a letter to mayor Bloomberg to complain about the violation of teachers' constitutional rights :
he was sent back that same day with new allegations of verbal abuse (of students). The UFT's lack of reaction speaks volume about its leaders' collusion with Klein and Bloomberg.
Thanks to the DOE-UFT contract, exonerated or not, the tenured teacher becomes an ATR (long-term substitute) : he is then responsible for ... seeking another position ! It makes sense to invoke RICO Enterprise theory in our complaint as we did initially.
The rubber room's population size, less than a hundred when Klein's tenure started in 2002, has exponentially increased :
Years |
Number of Inmates |
March 2005 |
315 |
March 2006 |
500 |
March 2007 |
651 |
Sept. 2007 |
757 |
New York Post, 9/30/07
|
To appreciate the magnitude of the abuse, compare these numbers to the statewide statistics of educators accused of misconduct over the last decade 1995-2005, under the NYS Education Law section 3020a :
3020-a Decisions statewide |
| Year (1995-2005) |
95 |
96 |
97 |
98 |
99 |
00 |
01 |
02 |
03 |
04 |
05 |
Total |
| Terminate |
8 |
8 |
10 |
8 |
10 |
15 |
13 |
22 |
34 |
22 |
20 |
170 |
| Unpaid Suspension |
9 |
5 |
16 |
11 |
14 |
19 |
24 |
21 |
28 |
32 |
34 |
213 |
| Fine |
2 |
3 |
5 |
5 |
5 |
4 |
5 |
5 |
11 |
11 |
17 |
73 |
| Reprimand |
0 |
1 |
3 |
1 |
0 |
5 |
7 |
3 |
2 |
3 |
3 |
28 |
| Acquit |
3 |
4 |
8 |
3 |
5 |
11 |
17 |
16 |
10 |
4 |
4 |
85 |
| Other |
0 |
0 |
0 |
1 |
0 |
0 |
4 |
0 |
1 |
3 |
2 |
11 |
| Total |
22 |
21 |
42 |
29 |
34 |
54 |
70 |
67 |
86 |
75 |
80 |
580 |
|