New York Public Schools Still Paying $65 Million/Year To Teachers Who Sit Around And Do Nothing
This is what Obama and his union cronies want to bring to the charter and private schools.
NEW YORK (AP) — Hundreds of New York City public school teachers accused of offenses ranging from insubordination to sexual misconduct are being paid their full salaries to sit around all day playing Scrabble, surfing the Internet or just staring at the wall, if that’s what they want to do.
Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them, the teachers have been banished by the school system to its “rubber rooms” — off-campus office space where they wait months, even years, for their disciplinary hearings.
The 700 or so teachers can practice yoga, work on their novels, paint portraits of their colleagues — pretty much anything but school work. They have summer vacation just like their classroom colleagues and enjoy weekends and holidays through the school year.
“You just basically sit there for eight hours,” said Orlando Ramos, who spent seven months in a rubber room, officially known as a temporary reassignment center, in 2004-05. “I saw several near-fights. `This is my seat.’ `I’ve been sitting here for six months.’ That sort of thing.”
Ramos was an assistant principal in East Harlem when he was accused of lying at a hearing on whether to suspend a student. Ramos denied the allegation but quit before his case was resolved and took a job in California.
Because the teachers collect their full salaries of $70,000 or more, the city Department of Education estimates the practice costs the taxpayers $65 million a year. The department blames union rules.
This actually illustrates a rather broad concept among liberals. The idea that nothing can be allowed to fail. Unions don’t let companies, or public schools, fire bad workers. Or they make it prohibitively difficult to do so. Nationally, Obama and his liberals haven’t been willing to let unionized companies like GM and Chrysler fail so that they can be replaced by companies that can be run at a profit. They haven’t been willing to let banks fail either.
Liberals forget that failure, in a free market and free society, is as important as success. Failure allows for the bad to be replaced by the good.
Unfortunately, liberals are too busy lining their pockets and doing favors for their political allies to let that happen.
