The United Federation of Teachers is protesting a teacher's removal to one of New York City's famed "rubber rooms."
The president of the union, Randi Weingarten, said yesterday that Mr. Brown was asked to leave the school last week after he criticized his principal in front of one of her supervisors."She won't ever meet with me or talk to me," Mr. Brown told the supervisor, according to Ms. Weingarten.
"This is the worst abuse of the rubber room," Ms. Weingarten said. "This is a principal who wants her way, and if she doesn't get her way, she'll go to every length."
A spokesman for the city's Department of Education, Andrew Jacob, declined to specifics of the case, but he said the principal had not reassigned the teacher to a rubber room alone.
"Before he was reassigned, the principal reviewed the situation with our legal office, and they approved the reassignment, and they're in the process of preparing charges," Mr. Jacob said.
Unions are wrong about a lot of things, but it probably is indeed the case that some principals value loyalty over competence and consequently make stupid personnel decisions. Most of them attained leadership positions by toeing the district line, and now they expect the same obedience from their employees. Thus, a New York City teacher who's smart enough to realize how poorly-run her school is has to hold her tongue or risk having it ripped out.
So well done on the diagnosis, UFT, but your prescription is more likely to kill the patient than cure it. Protesting controversial personnel decisions so that they'll go to a never-ending arbitration process where the union's definition of "due process" makes it near-impossible to actually fire anyone is not the way to fix a complex bureaucracy rife with management problems. What's needed is better principals who demand high performance, not fawning, from their faculties and staffs--principals who can be trusted to hire and fire the right people.
