The Issue: New York City teacher Alan Rosenfeld’s decade-long “rubber room” assignment.
***
No wonder America’s public-school system is failing — we have teachers making very nice salaries for doing absolutely nothing (“A Creep & His Friends,” Editorial, Jan. 31).
Why should this guy leave? He’s living the dream. While Americans struggle, Alan Rosenfeld is the poster child for what’s wrong with the civil service and unions.
The Japanese and Chinese must laugh at our education system. There, a guy like Rosenfeld would have been tossed out long ago.
Politicians make excuses, and the public has to pay more in taxes. Yet the more we pay, the worse the students do.
Glen Benjamin
Airmont
***
Granted, there are many in the teaching profession who are unqualified and some who are borderline criminal.
With a school system as large as New York City’s, with tens of thousands of employees, it is easy to “cherry-pick” the exceptions to the general rule of decent, hard-working and committed professionals.
That Rosenfeld is protected is a function of the American predilection for a system of due process that is intended to protect the innocent from capricious and fallacious prosecution.
The rules are often full of loopholes that enable such outrages you so eagerly expose with regard to your favorite scapegoats — teachers and their unions.
E. Banks
Brooklyn
***
I understand the use of Rosenfeld as a symbol of union-protection rights run amok, but after the Department of Education failed to produce evidence against him, he should have returned to the classroom.
Once there, he could have been given an unsatisfactory rating and properly charged with incompetence. If the DOE followed proper protocol, Rosenfeld could have been removed years ago.
If this teacher is a metaphor for anything, it’s the DOE’s mismanagement via mayoral control.
JB McGeever
Stony Brook