A year ago, the Los Angeles Unified School District said it was taking steps to reduce the number of teachers relegated to “rubber rooms” — a derisive term for the place where school staff members land when accused of misconduct of one kind or another and are deemed unfit to be around students.
A year later, there are more staff in “teacher jail” than before, and it’s no easier to get rid of the really bad apples.
While the situation is not optimal for teachers or students, it’s even worse for the district, which continues to pay salaries to staff members who aren’t producing anything.
A year ago, the number stood at 174; now it’s up to 181, according to LA School Report. While that’s a tiny fraction of the 26,800 teachers and 30,500 certified staff employed by LAUSD, it’s a significant number of teaching hours lost to students and paid for — to no result — by taxpayers.
Once teachers are placed in a rubber room, a 15-member Student Safety Investigation Team begins an investigation to determine whether they are cleared, and can return to the classroom, or referred for dismissal. The average length of an investigation is 75 days, although there are currently 45 cases that are more than a year old.
Some of the accused get to spend their time at home. Others, though, must report to work, head to detention, and stay there all day, doing no teaching. They aren’t even supposed to be on a computer or make a phone call.
All the while, the teachers-in-limbo are out of the classroom and still getting paid; $15 million has been set aside in the 2016-17 budget to pay employees in rubber rooms.
Forty percent of the existing cases involve allegations of sexual abuse or harassment, 29 percent involved alleged violence, and 13 percent of LAUSD employees housed in rubber rooms stand accused of “below standard performance.”
Education reformers suggest the halfway-house treatment of substandard teachers is symptomatic of a larger problem.
“The increase in teachers in rubber rooms in Los Angeles underscores the inadequacy of state teacher-dismissal laws,” said Lance Izumi, Koret senior fellow and senior director of education studies at the Pacific Research Institute.
Izumi pointed to Vergara v. California, a case that challenged teacher tenure laws, in which student plaintiffs challenged state statutes that leave ineffective teachers in the classroom. A disparate impact on poor and minority students exists, they argued, because those students were more likely to be assigned to an ineffective teacher. Judge Rolf M. Treu of the California Superior Court ruled in favor of the students, but an appellate court later overturned the decision.
“While the state appellate court in the Vergara case said that district administrators have the ability to get rid of bad teachers, these numbers demonstrate that they don’t and that the dismissal statutes are not working,” said Izumi. “In order to get rid of bad teachers, we need to get rid of bad laws.”
“Hopefully, California’s Supreme Court will see that the state’s dismissal, tenure, and seniority laws violate students’ right to a quality education,” Izumi added.
Larry Sand, a former teacher and head of the California Teachers Empowerment Network, concurs with Izumi’s assessment.
“Due to the byzantine dismissal statutes that are in the state education code — the same union-mandated statutes the Vergara litigants are trying to rewrite — it is very difficult to get rid of an under-performing or even criminal teacher. It is also prohibitively expensive,” he said.