Rubber Rooms

I heard a This American Life story last night about Rubber Rooms. It can be heard here. These are temporary "Reassignment Centers" for teachers in the New York City public school system. Teachers may be pulled from the classrooms for any of a variety of reasons and assigned to a Rubber Room, where the have to show up each workday and sit for seven hours to get paid. Some people are assigned this purgatory for years. It is a bizarre and arbitrary system. In these circumstances, apparently, people quickly begin to behave like people in prison. They played a snippet of what it sounded like on a typical day. It sounded just like a High School classroom when the teacher is out.

- J