Rubber Room

This American Life keeps on getting better and better; This week’s program took us through the myriad workings of the public school system to uncover the so-called “rubber room” phenomenon which is an effective prison for “misbehaving” teachers that are employed in public school system.

I have said many times that modernity is broken; this antiquated system with all its institutions can no longer provide any value to students that expect to learn skills useful to them in a connected, globalized, information driven world… It turns out, things are not grand for teachers either. It turns out, .the industrial education system, which is being perceived as a prison for kids for decades, can become a prison for teachers as well. One can laugh at the irony of this and enjoy it with its bare naked display of ineffectiveness, but valuable resources being wasted is no joking matter; especially nowadays when public money is being wasted in bottomless holes, broken banks, financial institutions - daily. Hearing of another crack in the system darkens the mood just that much more.

To summarize: Rubber room is a holding facility that can contain tens, if not hundreds of teachers. There are about half a dozen of these facilities in New York state alone. Rubber room is a building with rooms, with seats in those rooms where punished teachers come in and sit all day. That’s all. They sit and do nothing. Meanwhile they keep collecting their salaries as if they are working full-time.

According to reports, a teacher can spent years in this limbo. Maybe he or she was heard swearing (to himself, not necessarily to a student), they get sent here. A teacher does not get along with the superintendent of the school. He gets sent here. Of course there are cases when a teacher did act violently - not necessarily against a student by the way, but seen performing some kind of “acting out” in school. They get sent here.

What we have here is an utter ineffectiveness of education system that is incapable of utilizing human resources. There are about 700 teachers in such rubber rooms who are “doing time” at a given time, that means around 700 people, monthly, get paid for doing nothing.

We must junk this system.

The classroom of the future must be teacher-less, be driven by personal projects and must be peer mentored, self-taught, self-tested. We must go this route because not only this will offer better education for our kids. We must do this because we must. Synchronized teacher-teaches-student-listens paradigm is effectively broken, we cannot find enough qualified teachers to teach a growing population the skills needed to be effective in the new economy.

If we continue to insist on a system that is not working, we will continue to have such horrid places like the rubber room. This Kafkaesque hell hole symbolizes all troubles that are swept under the rug - it is a place where people are made to “disappear” simply because they do not somehow fit in the idealized, perfect “machine”. Unfortunately, modern world is full of such dirt-under-the-rug scenarios. If you know where to look, you will see them, and once you do, you are dumbfounded not being able to connect what you hear with your ideas of your “developed” nation. The fact that there are 18 million empty homes in United States was such an eye-opener for me.

We need Architecture 3.0.

The next best thing.

Now.