Forum Overview :: Balance of Power
 
Rubber Room by Mischief Maker 09/23/2015, 6:40pm PDT
blackwater wrote:

The overwhelming power of public sector unions leads to things like this: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/31/the-rubber-room where bad teachers can't even be fired, but have to continue to be paid.
(Hyperlink added by me, you lazy libertarian fuck!)

I've been hearing a lot of talk in the media lately about, "Is a college education really worth it if it doesn't get you a job automatically?" Well I can tell you one thing a college education is good for: learning the critical reasoning skills necessary to see through hatchet-pieces in the media like this one and uncover the truth.

The issue in this article is that tenured teachers in New York schools can't be fired without cause. Tenure for public school teachers in New York is not the same as tenure for professors. If they're accused of misconduct, they have the right to a 3020a hearing before a neutral arbitrator who hears the charges and makes a ruling whether the issue is legit or not. If you care to read the details you will learn that a list of arbitrators is provided by the American Arbitrator's Association, and both sides have veto power over who to choose, so if a specific arbitrator is known to be in the pocket of the teacher's union, the administration can say no to that person.

blackwater says, and this article implies, that the existence of tenure and its attendant 3020a hearings are proof of the overwhelming power of teacher's unions. I quote from your own article:

One thing that the legislature did not change in 2002 was tenure, which was introduced in New York in 1917, as a good-government reform to protect teachers from the vagaries of political patronage.

The United Federation of Teachers, the U.F.T., was founded in 1960. Before that, teachers endured meagre salaries, tyrannical principals, witch hunts for Communists, and gender discrimination against a mostly female workforce (at one point, there was a rule requiring any woman who got pregnant to take a two-year unpaid leave).


Wow, the unions have the overwhelming power of time travel, allowing them to travel back in time 43 years before they were even formed to create the law in question here!

Now what the author refers to as "vagaries of political patronage" is politically-motivated revenge firings of public workers after public office changes hands. In other words, if you're a republican working a public job under a republican administration, then a democrat gets elected into a position of power over you, he can't just fire you as punishment for your political affiliation, he's got to have a reason and proof to back that reason up. Once again I quote:

Like ninety-seven per cent of all teachers in the pre-Bloomberg days, she was given tenure after her third year of teaching, and then, like ninety-nine per cent of all teachers before 2002, she received a satisfactory rating each year.

“But they brought in some new young principal from their so-called Leadership Academy,” Scheiner said. She was referring to a facility opened by Klein in 2003, where educators and business leaders, such as Jack Welch, the former chief executive of General Electric, hold classes for prospective principals. “This new principal set me up, because I was a whistle-blower,” Scheiner said. “She gave me an unsatisfactory rating two years in a row.Then she trumped up charges against me and sent me to the Rubber Room. So I’m fighting, and waiting it out.”


It sounds to me like the law is operating exactly as intended. Bloomberg gets elected and suddenly goes on an attempted firing rampage, and the law prevents him from being able to wave his hand like Caligula and say, "Off with their heads!" his people are forced to present proof. Enter the "Rubber Room":

The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day—which is pretty much nothing at all. Watched over by two private security guards and two city Department of Education supervisors, they punch a time clock for the same hours that they would have kept at school—typically, eight-fifteen to three-fifteen. Like all teachers, they have the summer off. The city’s contract with their union, the United Federation of Teachers, requires that charges against them be heard by an arbitrator, and until the charges are resolved—the process is often endless—they will continue to draw their salaries and accrue pensions and other benefits.


This paragraph is where the article really started to stink for me. Basically, there's a three year wait to be heard in front of the arbitrator for some reason, and the Bloomberg administration is forcing these teachers to wait it out in unpleasant environments with no less than FOUR city employees watching over each room, which the article implies are numerous. Aren't we supposed to be outraged by people being paid to sit around all day? I can tell you why they need a security detail of TWO for 15 teachers, so that when one of them goes to take a piss, the other one is still there, staring at you...



...but the two Department of Education Supervisors? Sitting around all day and muttering "Just quit... just quit... just quit..." under their breaths? Nice work at taxpayer expense if you can get it!

Now if you don't know, the whole point of arbitration is that it's like going to court, but much, much faster because you aren't waiting for years to get on the docket. Once you hire an arbitrator, the case can begin in earnest and be done in a matter of months. The city has money for all these people to hover over the teachers, they're spending the money on these teachers' salaries during the wait, and there are more than enough arbitrators in New York to handle all of Bloomberg's cases. Why aren't they hiring the extra arbitrators needed to get the cases out of the way, fire the bad teachers, and save millions in taxpayer dollars?

Brandi Scheiner says that her case is likely to be heard next year. By then, she will have twenty-four years’ seniority, which entitles her to a pension of nearly half her salary—that is, her salary at the time of retirement—for life, even if she is found incompetent and dismissed. Because two per cent of her salary is added to her pension for each year of seniority, a three-year stay in the Rubber Room will cost not only three hundred thousand dollars in salary but at least six thousand dollars a year in additional lifetime pension benefits.


I know the author tried to angle this to make her sound like some kind of welfare queen, but even a layman should be savvy enough to recognize this as the prototypical wrongful termination case. Dude gives more than three decades of his life to a company in anticipation of a retirement pension, five years before the date some fuck trying to inflate quarterly earnings decides if they fire the dude before he gets the pension he's contractually due, they'd save a bundle. Dude successfully sues the company for wrongful termination.

At this point I have to break it to you that you're too late again on this issue, blackwater. Your New Yorker article was published in 2009 and in 2010 the New York Times published an article titled, 'Rubber Rooms' for Teachers are being Eliminated. Here's a choice quote from it:

The agreement would also shorten the time it takes for cases to be resolved by allowing more arbitrators to be hired — 39, up from 23 — and requiring them to decide cases more quickly.


There it is. The problem of teachers sitting in "Rubber Rooms" for years was entirely under the control of the Bloomberg administration. They could have hired the extra arbitrators necessary to speed up the firings and they didn't, not until they were publicly embarrassed by the New Yorker article. They spent the money instead on security guards and supervisors whose job was to make the teachers miserable, hopefully miserable enough that they quit before they collect their pension. Why am I so confident this was the real story?

These fifteen teachers, along with about six hundred others, in six larger Rubber Rooms in the city’s five boroughs, have been accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or, in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent.

Although the city has invested about $2 million in hiring more lawyers to help principals get rid of teachers, it has managed to fire only three for incompetence in the last two years. During the last two school years, 45 teachers have been fired for misconduct, like corporal punishment, sexual harassment or crimes.


This is a gross abuse of power. If there's one lesson I learned from my time in a prosecutor's office, it's that you wield incredible power to ruin people's lives so if you aren't confident the charges will stick, don't prosecute. Out of the 600 teachers publicly humiliated and forced to be treated like prisoners under threat of losing the pensions they worked their whole lives for, 92.5% of those charges didn't stick when presented before a neutral third party. I'd bet money they knew they couldn't make it stick and were hoping their rubber rooms would drive at least a few of them into abandoning their pensions.

Your story doesn't show the evils of public sector unions, blackwater, it reinforces the ever-present need for them!



Now I'd like to share a personal story of teachers unions and incompetence. In High School I can say without a doubt I had an incompetent AP Biology teacher. Nice guy, likable guy, would have been great mixing vinegar and baking soda in front of a room full of middle schoolers, but he was completely out of his depth teaching college-level biology. He had no control over the classroom, girls would play cards in the back of class all the time while he attempted to lecture. I got the feeling he was cramming from the textbook the night before. Anything I learned in that class I got from the book directly. How did this guy end up teaching AP Bio? Was the evil teacher's union involved? Sorta...

You see, the previous year when I signed up for AP Bio, our school had an excellent teacher doing the class who knew his shit and all the older kids who took his class loved him. The problem was, this teacher wanted to get the pay and treatment commensurate with his ability so he was very active in the teacher's union. This was the 90s, when "fuck teachers in the ass" fever was sweeping the republican party, and his union activities proved a thorn in the side of the administration in my conservative town. They wanted him out of the way, all they needed was an excuse. One day someone looked at his school computer's hard drive and found digital pictures from a class trip to the Caribbean that he chaperoned. These pictures included photos taken at the beach and some of them had pictures of female students *gasp* in bikinis! That was all they needed to point the finger and say, "J'Accuse!"

He ended up in Wisconsin's equivalent of the rubber room and the administration still needed someone to run the AP Bio class that I signed up for, so they put a completely unprepared teacher in his place. Was my experience as a student improved due to this protective act by the school administration? FUCK. NO. So you can understand why I'm automatically skeptical when people tell tales of overpowering teacher's unions lording it over powerless little mayors and governors.
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Walker out, praise Christ NT by laudablepuss 09/21/2015, 2:03pm PDT NEW
    People were always ganging up on him by Vested Id 09/21/2015, 3:55pm PDT NEW
        Really? I thought people always forgot about him. Less presence than Cruz NT by skip 09/21/2015, 4:17pm PDT NEW
        He was a Northern governor who pushed union reform. That took a lot of clout. by WITTGENSTEIN 09/21/2015, 4:34pm PDT NEW
            Oh, we're calling it "union reform" now? by Mischief Maker 09/21/2015, 4:45pm PDT NEW
                Well he reformed the concept of unions into... wage slavery I guess? That counts NT by The Happiness Engine 09/21/2015, 4:53pm PDT NEW
            Jesus, I thought the Cables were the only retarded libertarians here by real talk 09/21/2015, 8:25pm PDT NEW
                Re: Jesus, I thought the Cables were the only retarded libertarians here by Worm 09/21/2015, 8:43pm PDT NEW
                I don't know he just seemed more likable than the average bear by Vested Id 09/22/2015, 1:11am PDT NEW
                    Whoa the left wing media has flooded the net with doofy photos of Gov. Walker NT by Vested Id 09/22/2015, 1:14am PDT NEW
                        Is EVERY republican a closet case? by Mischief Maker 09/22/2015, 6:15am PDT NEW
                            Re: Is EVERY republican a closet case? by Vested Id 09/22/2015, 8:49am PDT NEW
                                Sarcasm is a difficult thing to detect on the internets, my apologies. by Mischief Maker 09/22/2015, 9:48am PDT NEW
                            Probably. They're worried you'll shut down their businesses and sue if NT by they make you unhappy. 09/22/2015, 9:20pm PDT NEW
                Somebody is really fucking staked in his 40k a year government salary here by WITTGENSTEIN 09/22/2015, 10:19am PDT NEW
                    So what high powered shit are you doing now? Hedge funds, neurosurgery, attorney by Worm 09/22/2015, 11:52am PDT NEW
                        None of the above (oil and gas drilling) by WITTGENSTEIN 09/25/2015, 3:40pm PDT NEW
                    Haha, demanding a living wage! The gall of these peasants! by real talk 09/22/2015, 3:35pm PDT NEW
                        Re: Haha, demanding a living wage! The gall of these peasants! by Mysterio Lollerson 09/25/2015, 3:16pm PDT NEW
                            My only posts here have been under my name by WITTGENSTEIN 09/25/2015, 3:32pm PDT NEW
                                OK. NT by Mysterio Lollerson 09/25/2015, 8:04pm PDT NEW
                    Haha yay you are insane by laudablepuss 09/22/2015, 3:41pm PDT NEW
                        Government workers should be accountable to the people. by blackwater 09/22/2015, 8:23pm PDT NEW
                            Re: Government workers should be accountable to the people. by Wisconsin State Senator 09/22/2015, 9:32pm PDT NEW
                                LESS GOVERNMENT = MOAR FREEDOMS! by real talk 09/23/2015, 3:32pm PDT NEW
                                    Re: LESS GOVERNMENT = MOAR FREEDOMS! by Wisconsin State Senator 09/26/2015, 11:58am PDT NEW
                                        Re: LESS GOVERNMENT = MOAR FREEDOMS! by Mischief Maker 09/26/2015, 1:08pm PDT NEW
                                            Re: LESS GOVERNMENT = MOAR FREEDOMS! by Wisconsin State Senator 09/26/2015, 2:04pm PDT NEW
                                                Why didn't you reply to (or at least quote) the post you were satirizing? NT by Eidetic Maker 09/26/2015, 3:00pm PDT NEW
                                                    Re: Why didn't you reply to (or at least quote) the post you were satirizing? by Wisconsin State Senator 09/26/2015, 4:07pm PDT NEW
                                                        Look at me. Do I look happy about what you're doing here? by Pat Kilbane, Humor Coach 09/26/2015, 4:47pm PDT NEW
                                                            Look, he LITERALLY asked me for an explanation by xX=-krosfyre-=Xx 09/26/2015, 5:13pm PDT NEW
                            Accountability by Mischief Maker 09/23/2015, 6:34am PDT NEW
                                Thank you for actually replying rather than just spewing some identity politics by blackwater 09/24/2015, 6:52pm PDT NEW
                                    Re: spewing by Mischief Maker 09/24/2015, 8:39pm PDT NEW
                                        Re: spewing by blackwater 09/27/2015, 7:07am PDT NEW
                                    Identity politics! ha ha you poor dumb idiot by real talk 09/26/2015, 3:30pm PDT NEW
                                        It's funny to me that people won't even give Reagan credit for the cold war NT by Mysterio Lollerson 09/26/2015, 3:38pm PDT NEW
                                            Re: It's funny to me that people won't even give Reagan credit for the cold war by Souffle of Pain 09/26/2015, 7:18pm PDT NEW
                                            Did HE orchestrate the '91 Soviet coup attempt? by ???? ?????? 09/26/2015, 7:29pm PDT NEW
                                            For ending it, which hasn't been proven, or for saying that thing that one time by Vested Id 09/26/2015, 8:40pm PDT NEW
                            Rubber Room by Mischief Maker 09/23/2015, 6:40pm PDT NEW
                                Bikini man would've known how to control those girls in the back! NT by Injustice 09/23/2015, 7:21pm PDT NEW
                                Just to add a little context for why some people unconditionally hate teachers. by Worm 09/23/2015, 8:40pm PDT NEW
                                Re: Rubber Room by blackwater 09/27/2015, 7:34am PDT NEW
                            Referendum by Mischief Maker 09/23/2015, 7:09pm PDT NEW
                                Why are you arguing with this tard? by real talk 09/23/2015, 9:23pm PDT NEW
                                    Suffering fools is emotionally draining. Those posts were cathartic. NT by Mischief Maker 09/24/2015, 3:49am PDT NEW
                        No, you're just a stupid crybaby faggot by WITTGENSTEIN 09/25/2015, 3:42pm PDT NEW
                            Not-a-reply reply, but some more indications of your insanity NT by laudablepuss 09/26/2015, 6:44pm PDT NEW
                                That you're too stupid to understand basic concepts is not his problem. NT by What is rational self-interest? Hmm 10/02/2015, 4:29pm PDT NEW
                                    Ayn Rand? Seak to us! NT by Glenn Beck seance 10/02/2015, 5:48pm PDT NEW
                                    Undoubtedly. Quick question . . . by laudablepuss 10/04/2015, 9:56pm PDT NEW
        Re: People were always ganging up on him by laudablepuss 09/22/2015, 3:51pm PDT NEW
    Dropping out comes naturally to him. NT by Marquette University 09/21/2015, 4:03pm PDT NEW
 
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