It sure beats working. The scene is out of Franz Kafka. Or a mental ward.
Each day, nearly 100 ten- ured teachers and adminis- trators, among the brightest and most expensive minds the city can muster, sit in a Brooklyn room. Or they lie down.
As soon as they clock in, many place their heads on desks like recalcitrant children, a spy reports. There is nothing to do. And they do it well.
Suddenly, in walks the Patron Saint of Idle Teachers, a man who’s done more time in this room than any human — nine years. He is the inspiration and muse to hundreds of educators, some of whom spend years in reassignment centers, known as “rubber rooms.” He is typing teacher Alan Rosenfeld. He is the master.
Rubber rooms have become the symbol of everything in city government that makes one’s head want to explode. These oases of waste and neglect exist in all five boroughs, playing host to a whopping 660 educators who’ve been accused of everything from sexual abuse and stealing to incompetence. Here they sit, as their cases crawl through the system at a glacial pace, costing taxpayers tens of millions a year in salaries and benefits at a time when the school system is facing a billion-dollar deficit.
A disgrace.
None of these charges has sat on his rump as long as Rosenfeld, a lawyer who also owns millions in real estate. In 2001, he was caught leering at the backsides of junior-high girls and making lewd comments. He was suspended for a week — a wrist slap — and freed to teach again. But Schools Chancellor Joel Klein won’t have him near kids. And union rules say Klein can’t fire him. So we’re stuck with him.
Rosenfeld gets to work, a bizarre sight in this suffocating room where most teachers eat, sleep, peck at laptops or chitchat. He gets busy advising “clients” — other teachers in the same boat as he.
“He tells them how to beat the rap,” said a source. After nine years of drawing a now-$100,000-a-year salary for not teaching, he’s good at his job.
A groundswell of outrage has attached itself to the rubber rooms. The Department of Ed is fed up. Even the teachers union says it wants to shutter them — while doing everything in its power to protect bad teachers.
“We’ve been trying to get this fixed,” said United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew, who claims the Department of Ed is “very reluctant.”
Education officials laugh. “The notion that the union wants reform — that’s ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ ” said a department insider. Officials have proposed taking demonstrably bad educators off the city payroll. If they’re cleared of charges, they’d be reinstated with back pay. In the real world, that might work. This isn’t the real world.
“It was rejected by the union,” the insider said.
Make no mistake, the teachers union is a powerful player in state politics. It’s so fierce that when Klein traveled to Albany last week to talk reform, legislators laughed in his face.
Klein’s tenure as chancellor was described by state Sen. Carl Kruger as “nine years of torture, nine years of acrimony, nine years of nail biting and hand twisting.”
Hello, rubber room.
Proving she takes the matter seriously, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, is paying former 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund chief Kenneth Feinberg to study the issue on a national level. “I’m going to present her with a proposal that I think satisfies her twin concerns about efficiency and fairness,” he told me.
In the meantime, rubber rooms are a national disgrace, siphoning precious dollars from classrooms while the union flexes its muscle.
Stop the insanity! Fire the bums.
ONE OF H’WOOD’S ‘PRECIOUS’ FEW
Has Hollywood forgotten itself?
You don’t normally see movies coming out of the leftist land that deftly skewer the unglamorous culture of welfare dependency. But while studio heads were sleeping, Tinseltown produced “Precious.” The Oscar-nominated film, set in Harlem in 1987, tells the unbearable story of a teen twice impregnated by her own father, while her mother cheers on the abuse.
“Precious” features a ruthless mother, played by Mo’Nique, who won’t leave the house unless her monthly check is in peril. Her daughter (Gabourey Sidibe) endures the advances of her absentee father to please the dysfunctional freaks who are supposed to love her. Ultimately, she gins up the courage to walk away.
The biggest villain in this piece is a system that rewards egregious behavior while financially punishing those who are productive. It’s hard to watch. But it’s worth a look.
More maps erase Israel
Target has company.
Since I reported last week that Target stores had succeeded in wiping Israel from the map, selling tens of thousands of toy globes on which the name Israel was replaced with Palestine, I’ve received a flurry of reports about this kind of miniature genocide.
One reader was shocked after buying her kids miniglobe/pencil sharpeners at a dime store, only to find that Israel had ceased to exist. “Anti-Semitism is being spread all through grade school to innocent children!” she wrote.
Another received a letter soliciting a donation to Doctors Without Borders — an organization, started in France, that sends medical personnel to hell holes around the world. The letter contained a small gift: a map. Guess which country was missing.
“There was no Israel,” he said.
Doctors spokesman Michael Goldfarb told me his org received an avalanche of complaints over the maps, which he said omitted Israel because the space was too small. “There is no agenda here or political issue,” he said.
A later map includes the name Israel, plus Palestinian Territories. Finally, Doctors Without Borders produced a map that says Israel, nothing else.
That’s progress, I guess.
A tax break? Isn’t that rich
Leona Helmsley was right — only the little people pay taxes.
Longtime city employee Carol Post — just promoted to commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications — gets a tax exemption on the palatial Florida home she owns with her husband. At the same time, she’s being investigated for accepting a property-tax rebate on her Manhattan apartment.
Both of these exemptions are for full-time residents of the states in which they’re granted, and I doubt Post has special powers to be in two places at once.
No one hates taxes more than I do. But we’re talking about a privileged woman in charge of city policy getting breaks when others can’t.
Pay up, Post. Then get lost.
It’s rated ewww!
We get it. Former John Edwards toady Andrew Young has a sex tape starring the adulterous, pasty, middle-aged Edwards. His mistress/baby mama, Rielle Hunter, wants it, so the tape can never go public. Give it up. Please!
The mental image is scary enough.