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In a windowless room in a shabby office building at
Seventh Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street, in Manhattan, a poster is taped
to a wall, whose message could easily be the mission statement for a
day-care center: “Children are fragile. Handle with care.” It’s a June
morning, and there are fifteen people in the room, four of them fast
asleep, their heads lying on a card table. Three are playing a board
game. Most of the others stand around chatting. Two are arguing over one
of the folding chairs. But there are no children here. The inhabitants
are all New York City schoolteachers who have been sent to what is
officially called a Temporary Reassignment Center but which everyone
calls the Rubber Room.
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.
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.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/31/090831fa_fact_brill#ixzz0kL518f4x
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