Imagine that your boss wants you to sign a document accusing you of something you don't believe you did—a fireable offense like assaulting someone at work, for example—and your response is not only to refuse to sign, but to let loose a damning accusation that your boss was making up the allegation. And, for good measure, you call your boss "fat."
Now, in just about any industry you can think of, this would not bode well for your continued employment. But in this case, we're not talking about just any kind of workplace, but perhaps the most dysfunctional employee-employer interface in the history of paychecks.
In other words, the New York City public school system.
When, three years ago, Georgia Argyris, a teacher, was presented with a letter accusing her of yanking the arm of a kindergartner at P.S. 50 in East Harlem, she let loose with a stream of accusations at her principal, Rebekah Mitchell, and added some unkind words about Mitchell's weight.
At another kind of job, Argyris might have called on a union representative to help her fend off what she considered baseless claims (she was denied one). Or she might have been immediately terminated after calling attention to her boss's waistline (she wasn't). Or at the least, the allegations against her, and her counterclaims, might have been reviewed in a timely manner by an impartial third party, someone who wasn't the recipient of Argyris's unwise outburst.
But no, this is the public school system, and there's only one way New York knows how to deal with teachers accused of bad behavior: send them off to a Kafkaesque holding pen, where taxpayers continue to pay their salaries for months as they wait for the glacial pace of what passes for justice, meted out by a sluggish school district and intransigent union.
Argyris, not formally charged with any wrongdoing, would spend the next year and a half in this limbo, paid by taxpayers to sit in a childless classroom with other teachers awaiting their own hearings.
It's not hard to see why teachers call this place the "rubber room," where they spend months—and even years, some simply waiting to see what they've been charged with.
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