In this week’s issue of the magazine, Steven Brill writes about the Rubber Room, a sort of quarantine for New York City teachers who have been charged with incompetence or misconduct but are still on the payroll. Brill presents the Rubber Room, an outgrowth of the bureaucratic procedures required to fire a teacher, as a symbol of the grip that teachers’ unions have on education policy:

If the stimulus money does not push the U.F.T. and the legislature to permit these changes, and if Duncan and Obama are serious about challenging the unions that are the Democrats’ base, the city and the state will miss out on hundreds of millions of dollars in education aid. More than that, publicly educated children will continue to live in an alternate universe of reserve-list teachers being paid for doing nothing, Rubber Roomers writing mission statements, union reps refereeing teacher-feedback sessions, competence “hearings” that are longer than capital-murder trials, and student-performance data that are quarantined like a virus. As the Manhattan Rubber Room’s poster says, it’s the children, not the teachers, who are fragile and need to be handled with care.

Last December, Malcolm Gladwell examined research showing that it was often obvious within two years whether someone would be a good teacher:

Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before….That means tenure can’t be routinely awarded, the way it is now. Currently, the salary structure of the teaching profession is highly rigid, and that would also have to change in a world where we want to rate teachers on their actual performance.

Other recent New Yorker articles about education reform have complicated the argument that unions are an immutable obstacle. In the May 11, 2009, issue, Douglas McGray profiled the Los Angeles charter-school entrepreneur Steve Barr, whose grassroots approach toward fixing schools had been successful partly because he saw labor as an ally:

He has built Green Dot to be a political force unlike anything else in the world of education. For instance, Barr runs the only large charter organization in the country that has embraced unionized teachers and a collectively bargained contract—an unnecessary hassle, if his aim was to run a few schools, but a source of leverage for Green Dot’s main purpose, which is to push for citywide change. “I don’t see how you tip a system with a hundred per cent unionized labor without unionized labor,” he said.

In January, 2007, Katherine Boo profiled Denver’s then school superintendent Michael Bennet, who inherited a system that was struggling even though the teachers’ union had been willing to take risks. He discovered that the problem lay outside the classroom, and implemented a far-reaching program that took on failing schools by going directly into the communities and taking on subtle social structures that kept kids from even showing up in the first place:

Out of panic, and of motivations that involved personal vanity as well as social justice, a safety net was being strung under a school system’s hardest cases—one involving parents, mentors, fast-food restaurant managers, United Airlines executives and city-council members who knocked on doors, an engrossed media, nonprofit organizations, and student leaders like Julissa Torrez….The notion of high expectations for poor children had been converted from the rhetorical to the specific and pragmatic, and a rescue effort that once seemed a sinkhole of time and effort began to look like a prototype.

The articles by Brill, Gladwell, and Boo are available online. The article by McGray—and the complete archive of The New Yorker, back to 1925—is available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can buy the individual issue.

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