Wednesday, December 08, 2010
"Rubber rooms": Another joy of government schools
It is, apparently, as hard to fire incompetent public school teachers in New York as anywhere else:
For her first assignment of the school year, Verona Gill, a $100,000-a-year special education teacher whom the city is trying to fire, sat around education offices in Lower Manhattan for two weeks, waiting to be told what to do.
For her second assignment, she was sent to a district office in the Bronx and told to hand out language exams to anyone who came to pick them up. Few did.
Now, Ms. Gill reports to a cubicle in Downtown Brooklyn with a broken computer and waits for it to be fixed. Periodically, her supervisor comes by to tell her she is still working on the problem. It has been this way since Oct. 8.
“I have no projects to do, so I sit there until 2:50 p.m. — that’s six hours and 50 minutes,” the official length of the teacher workday, she said. “And then I swipe out.”
It gets worse from there.
Manhattan voters are far more likely to support governmental rather than private action than most Americans, yet New York government -- at all levels -- is, frankly, appallingly expensive and inefficient compared to the governments of all but a couple other states. California, which is one of those other states, just re-elected a slate of "more government" Democrats. Both states are full of putatively smart people who, apparently, are so enamored of the theoretical virtues of big government that they are blind to its actual lumbering, bloated, and sweaty incompetence.
5 Comments:
By 
, at
Wed Dec 08, 10:53:00 AM:
One wonders how many such 'jobs" like this are out there across the entire government spectrum? Sheesh...
Doggone it, I could do nothing from my house for 50K/yr and I have a computer that works(!). I would think the NY taxpayers would be pleased?
By , at
Wed Dec 08, 10:59:00 AM:
Thank You!! Getting these kind of stories out somethings actually gets results cause it's not what we see in mainstream media.
These are the same type of bureaucrats we have now & will have with ObamaCare.
Just read a new book that's a must read cause it's actually about Americans who take a stand. I'll be giving it out this holiday cause it's about us.
www.booksbyoliver.com
I hope you can find more news like this one so we can get the word out to others about the inemptness of bureaucrats (and teachers). Again, thanks....great article.
By 
JPMcT, at
Wed Dec 08, 06:49:00 PM:
It's all relative.
Obama's salary is four times that amount, yet he is logarithmically more annoying and dangerous.
Clearly Democrats are at their worst with their own money. Fortunately, most are content to squander the money of others.
By Don Cox, at
Thu Dec 09, 06:08:00 AM:
I wonder how many of these teachers in limbo are really incompetent, and how many have been wrongly accused or simply fallen foul of a vindictive head teacher.
By rashid1891, at
Sat Dec 11, 04:22:00 AM:
