Educational Links
Can there be any doubt that The New Yorker is among the top five magazines in the United States? What a feat to put out a product of that quality every week! My laudatory words are justified by most every issue, but a particular story has inspired them today: the excellent Steven Brill piece on “rubber rooms” in New York City. These are the places that teachers go to collect full pay for doing nothing as they await performance hearings.
The most egregious practices:
— On average teachers spend 3 years in the rubber rooms before their cases are resolved.
— The actual adjudication process often takes longer than a criminal trial.
— Arbitrators are reluctant to dismiss even those teachers who’ve been found incompetent by the process.
— This is because arbitrators, who are handsomely paid for their work, must be re-approved annually by the teacher’s union.
— The union contract “dictates every minute of the six hours, fifty-seven and a half minutes of a teacher’s work day, including a thirty-seven-and-a-half-minute tutorial/preparation session and a fifty-minute “duty free” lunch period. It also inserts a union representative into every meaningful teacher-supervisor conversation.”
— New York City pays 1700 teachers who aren’t in the classroom at all.
Read the whole thing. And also see these excellent thoughts on merit pay offered by Matt Yglesias and Megan McArdle, who dispute the merit-less argument that those who advocate it are anti-teacher.
Just for the record, as a Frenchman, I actually ENVY the rubber rooms.
— PEG · Sep 10, 07:34 AM · #
Interestingly, “This American Life” did this story in Feb. of 2008.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=350
— B Wiley · Sep 10, 10:56 AM · #
I agree that both parties have drifted into government interventionism, each for their pet purposes, and until we can limit government power, the temptations of each party to favor special interests will be too great to resist. That’s the purpose of limitations, to safeguard freedom from imperfect human beings. The prevailing assumption, it seems, in each party is that if only they had the power, they could lead fairly and intelligently, but when special interests begin to pressure politicians, some in society are inevitably favored over others, and we fall back to the rule of men/women over rule of law.
— mike farmer · Sep 10, 11:10 AM · #
Whoops, I commented on the wrong post.
— mike farmer · Sep 10, 11:56 AM · #
“This is because arbitrators, who are handsomely paid for their work, must be re-approved annually by the teacher’s union.”
Hey,hey! I smell some left-right consensus! Surely we can get some right-to-work state Senator to take a look at this and sign on to Russ Feingold’s bill barring mandatory arbitration clauses when only one side gets to pick the arbitrator (e.g. cell phone contracts, autos, credit card contracts, etc.)
— Nicholas Beaudrot · Sep 10, 02:20 PM · #
Conor,
Actually there can be some doubt that The New Yorker is among the top five magazines in the country. If you’ve never met anyone who’s doubted it, you need to get out more — you’d learn a lot that way.
— TRB · Sep 10, 07:43 PM · #
TRB,
Yes, of course there can be and is doubt — the obvious intended meaning is that I regard The New Yorker as one of the five best.
— Conor Friedersdorf · Sep 11, 07:43 AM · #