Listen to this episode of “This American Life”. It’s fascinating…shocking actually. I had heard that something like “The Rubber Room” existed in NYC, but I never knew much about it. For those that don’t know…it is literally a purgatory for public school teachers. In fact, “purgatory” is the most perfect definition I can think of for it. A seemingly indefinite, yet still horrible, stop-off on the way to hell.
When a teacher screws up for one reason or another, they get ”reassigned” to this place where they do nothing. They are sent to a room in a building where they go and simply sit. They do nothing at all. Let me reiterate: they do nothing at all.
…Oh by the way, they get paid their full salary. Some people are there for years. Yes, years.
Wanna take a guess why? Let me interpret: the teachers union to which all of those teachers no doubt belong is a manipulative communist bastion of organized insanity that would rather subject its members to the ridiculousness of teacher-purgatory (while the tax payers pick up the tab) than allow them to be simply fired. (Because, you know, teachers should almost never EVER be fired…even when they throw chairs at chalkboards or touch kids inappropriately or commit violence in a school or other little petty things like that.)
Of course, the teachers all blame the Department of Education as if they are the bad guy. I don’t buy it. There’s no way in hell that any organization, public or private, would willingly continue to pay a full salary to someone to sit around doing nothing all day, especially when that person so obviously just needs to be terminated. That’s the part that boggles my mind. They just need to be fired. It’s shouldn’t be that hard.
But the uniontards™ can’t have that. They’ve got to “protect” their teachers just in case they have been falsely accused of throwing that chair or touching that kid. Yeah. They can’t have them go out on the street looking for work like the rest of the screw-ups. They need those union dues every month from those 800 (not a typo) Rubber Room teachers’ salaries.
Unbelievable.
What’s really fascinating is how these teachers start to break down and act like deviant teenagers after a few weeks, months, years in The Rubber Room. Everything from cliques to fist-fights, with every bit as much territorialism as your average Jr. High lunchroom.
Anyway, check it out. Click the link above to get it from This American Life’s site, or you can get it from iTunes (expires in a week).
