Economist Roland Fryer’s Educational Innovation Laboratory is off to the races, thanks to the Broad Foundation, experimenting with new ways of incentivizing kids to learn in three big cities (New York, Chicago, Washington). In D.C., the plan involves paying students in fifteen middle schools up to $1500 a year if they (a) attend, (b) behave and (c) get good grades.

I’m a longtime believer in giving young people real-world incentives to study hard and do well in school, though I’ve long supposed that means doing a better job of hinging promotion, graduation, college admission and jobs on school success. I don’t have any big problem with more immediate and kid-like rewards, either, such as taking students with perfect attendance records to a theme park at the end of the year or giving pizzas to those who read more books.

Paying them cold cash to do the right thing gives me pause, however. It’s fundamentally amoral. It creates weird and perverse incentives for pupils and teachers alike. It could get very expensive, using serious money that might otherwise go into better teachers, better textbooks, longer times, more instructional technology, etc. (Chicago has about 125,000 students in grades 5-8. At $1500 apiece, a totally successful program for them would cost $187.5 million per annum.)

Besides all that, I really want to know if it’s going to work—and I really want that question to be addressed by analysts completely independent of Roland Fryer. Is there a freestanding evaluation built into this? Will the necessary data be available to one and all to analyze? Fryer is a fine economist and presumably an honest man. But nobody should be his own evaluator. That’s an even more dubious proposition than paying kids to do what’s in their own interest in the first place.

When I first read this article, I was skeptical. Giving bonuses to teachers and principals at failing schools? Doesn’t that undermine the whole concept of merit pay—as in, rewards for meritorious performance? But perhaps not. 

Lest we get strapped to an imaginary bar—and thereby eliminate the idea of improvement—Bloomberg and Klein just may have taken the right approach. These schools are failing, yes, and they will be closed as a result, but they’re still open now. And since they’re still open, they still have students, who, it must be pointed out, are not mere numbers in a statistical study. In that sense, that these teachers still have an incentive to keep working with the students they have, even if only a third of them are proficient, is a positive thing. That’s not to say that strong standards are somehow less important in situations such as these. But sometimes balancing short term and long term goals require seemingly contradictory policies.

Sol Stern offers a wise suggestion in this City Journal Online piece: create an independent agency in New York to verify student achievement results.

In campaigning for mayoral control in 2002, Bloomberg made New Yorkers an offer they couldn’t refuse: Give me the sole authority to improve the schools, and then hold me accountable for the results. The mayor promised to give taxpayers a bigger bang for their education buck. If he failed to deliver on that promise, the public would at least know that it was his failure and could vote him out of office... The problem was that the legislation failed to ensure that voters would have access to unimpeachable information about student achievement, a prerequisite to any reasoned judgment about how well the schools were doing under the new regime.

One might point out that state departments of education are supposed to play this role—providing unimpeachable information about student achievement—but it may be that these agencies are too weak and big-city systems too strong for this governance arrangement to work out in practice. So bring in the independent green-eye-shade types, and let the truth be known. But don’t expect the arguments over “what the data show” to cease. These are New Yorkers we’re talking about, after all, who subscribe to the maxim, “I bicker, therefore I am.”

I suppose we’d been warned, weeks ago, that the New York City Department of Education was watching us. So I shouldn’t have been surprised by the voice mail from Commissioner Joel Klein’s personal assistant (a woman with a lovely British accent) that arrived just hours after I wrote this post.

As you may recall, I tweaked Commissioner Klein for refusing to admit that his “Balanced Literacy” reading program in use across the district was a fraud.

Well.

We connected late yesterday, and Joel voiced his strong disagreement. Didn’t I know that New York City and Boston both got better reading results at the fourth-grade level than any other city—and that they both use balanced literacy? Didn’t I see the latest research (referring to this What Works Clearinghouse review) showing that Open Court and Reading Mastery are lacking in evidence of effectiveness? He argued that New York City is actually doing quite well, thank you, in the decoding department, as indicated by strong fourth-grade reading scores. Where it falls down (as illustrated by poor eighth-grade scores) is in helping students develop comprehension. And that’s why he’s become boosterish on Core Knowledge as a way to help his kids learn content. If the pilot is successful and they “get implementation right,” he intends to take it to scale.

At first blush this all makes sense, particularly the reading comprehension part, except for his claims about New York City and Boston. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, neither New York City nor Boston made statistically significant progress in fourth-grade reading from 2003 to 2007—the years that most closely overlap with Klein’s reforms. (See graphic below.) That was also the case for low-income, black, and Hispanic children. Maybe Klein is still trying to take credit for the progress made from 2002-2003—progress that happened before his reforms were implemented.

So I appreciate the call, Commissioner, but I continue to worry that New York City’s students are not getting the early reading instruction they need. Thankfully the Core Knowledge program you are piloting also has a scientifically-based reading component for young kids, so at least 1,000 students will be getting the strong start they deserve. By all means, get the implementation right, and then take it to scale as fast as possible—that is, if you want to see actual gains in student achievement.

Kudos to New York City for launching a new pilot program to put Core Knowledge in ten city schools. But what’s the matter with Schools Chancellor Joel Klein that he can’t get himself to admit that the “balanced literacy” program in use throughout the system is hogwash? “I view it as building on but not in any way repudiating [balanced literacy]—our results speak for themselves.”

Mr. Chancellor, a couple of months ago you admitted to me and 300 of our closest friends that “Month by Month” phonics was a big mistake. Why not acknowledge that balanced literacy is screwy too? (Read this report to understand why.)

Sol Stern gets the last word: “I can finally say something nice about one of Klein’s curriculum choices. Unfortunately, it’s just a few schools in the sixth year of his administration. But at least it looks like he’s educable.”

The insatiable Sol Stern is back with another broadside on the Bloomberg/Klein administration. This time he takes the Gotham group to task for poor decisions and faulty leadership on reading.

New York City’s 2002 shift to mayoral control of the schools created a unique opportunity.... Introducing his education-reform plan... Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that schools in the past had enjoyed too much autonomy, with “a baffling profusion of approaches to teaching the three Rs throughout the city.” Now, there would be “one, unified, focused, streamlined chain of command [and] the Chancellor’s office will dictate the curriculum and pedagogical methods.” The mayor promised that reading instruction in the early grades would “employ strategies proven to work,” including “a daily focus on phonics.”

But in a tragically mistaken policy decision, Klein went in the opposite direction on reading, franchising out most instructional decisions to a group of progressive educators who regarded it as a crime to teach children how to read through scripted phonics programs. Under the influence of his deputy chancellor for teaching and learning, Diana Lam, Klein chose an approach called Balanced Literacy for the system’s core reading program starting in September 2003. The city’s version of Balanced Literacy was crafted by Teachers College education professor and progressive-ed guru Lucy Calkins and included only a small phonics component, Month by Month Phonics. The rest of the program assumed, based on no real evidence, that children can intuit the meaning of printed words through context clues and through such activities as “shared reading” and “read alouds.” Champions of this approach believe that children can learn to read simply by reading-by immersing themselves in print. The city imposed the new program on virtually every elementary school in the city, even shutting down the special Chancellors’ District set up by one of Joel Klein’s predecessors, Rudy Crew, in which about 35 high-poverty schools were using a research-based reading program called Success for All and almost uniformly achieving higher reading scores.

Stern goes on to argue that neither New York City’s recent move toward school-level autonomy, nor Joel Klein’s remorse for picking Month by Month Phonics, have changed the situation; whole language still reigns supreme.

Stern wants a $150-million “Marshall Plan for Reading” for NYC; it’s too bad none of that tab will be picked up by the federal Reading First program, defunct as it is likely soon to be.

And Liam has been pushing for more of this.

(That’s not some weak attempt at a joke; he really has.)

Gary Babad creates satirical news about New York City’s public schools.

It was shortly after Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took over the school system in 2002 that Mr. Babad started to speak up, because, he said, things struck him as paternalistic and overly controlling. He recalled a PTA meeting at which someone said a particular bylaw needed to be changed to comply with a request from administrators downtown.

After a heated debate broke out, one of Mr. Babad’s daughters, who was about 10, came by to ask what the commotion was about.

“I explained to her that they were telling us our votes don’t count and that’s what some countries of the world do all the time,” Mr. Babad remembered. “She said right away, ‘Well, Dad, that’s not fair.’ ”

Critics of NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein (of which there is at least one important one in this office) and/or Al Sharpton (ditto) may not like reports that the duo is taking its Education Equality Project on the road. Ed reform’s new odd couple recently met with Obama staffers in Chicago, and word is that McCain may officially sign onto the project today when he talks education at the NAACP convention in Cincinnati.

From the New York Sun:

“To counter the power of the city teachers union and business leaders in shaping school policy, New York City should use taxpayer dollars to create two new unions complete with their own budgets and lobbyists, one for public school parents and one for public school students, a group is proposing.”

Some days our blog exhausts me. Not writing for it—I’m usually too busy—just reading it and thinking how I would have said something differently myself or would have bitten my tongue and said nothing at all. When we started it, I promised not to edit, just occasionally to point out what I take to be errors—and once in a while to pen items myself that can’t wait for next Thursday’s Gadfly or aren’t appropriate there.

In the past, these are the sorts of “corrections” I would have sought to make via quiet meetings in the office, but Mike insists that today’s fashion is to air our internal disagreements in public. So here are a few that cropped up today (which is just half over):

For reasons not clear to me, Liam wants to prove that the Democratic party is not anti-charter school or anti-merit pay. So he names a few worthy Democrats and Democrat-leaning organizations that themselves have advanced the charter and/or merit-pay cause. He’s right about the names. Indeed, there are more. But a few swallows do not prove that spring has come. Go to state capital after state capital around this broad land and anywhere that charter schools or some form of merit pay are on the table observe which legislators (with rare and honorable exception) are trying to make it happen and which (with rare and less honorable exception) are trying to kill it. Case closed. I’d love to see it reopened. But the ground is still mostly frozen.

Speaking of charter schools, I agree with our newest arrival, Stafford, that a two-hour-a-week high school is idiotic; but far from being a charter school, I read that Los Angeles Times article to suggest that the school system is very likely going to shut down a (somewhat idiotic) charter and then create this bizarre inside-the-system alternative for the displaced kids (and to recapture more state dollars for itself). With a little more digging I’m sure that Stafford, who is very able, can find out what’s actually happening in LaLa land rather than simply commenting on two short and less-than-clear grafs in a newspaper article.

And then there’s Coby. He’s very able, too (as is Liam, by the way), but I surely wouldn’t have issued his vigorous defense of the NYC education department’s new “truth squad.” He suggests therein that the poor mayor and chancellor don’t get nearly the media exposure that teacher union chief Weingarten gets (because she buys it) and that the poor, underappreciated bureaucracy thus doesn’t get its “sensible reforms” adequately noticed. Balderdash. Some of those reforms are sensible, some not, but I have rarely seen as overwhelming and relentless a governmental PR machine as the one that Joel Klein presides over—at least not in what we used to call the free world. Overexposure might be more accurate.

By the by, the Checker quote in the New York Sun that Coby tees off from, while accurately reprinted, originated in my own error. When Elizabeth Green called to ask what I thought of the “Department of Education’s new ‘truth squad’,” I, like any self-respecting Beltway dweller, assumed she was referring to the FEDERAL Department of Education. That’s what I was referring to when I said they might better use their money for NCLB repair work or vouchers than to add media watchdogs and blog eagles. It was Margaret in my imagination, not Joel.

And now I’m truly pooped.

While we’re on the topic, Checker had this to say of the New York City ed department’s new Truth Squad (from the same New York Sun article):

“I’d rather see them use their money to fix NCLB or to give a kid a voucher,” Mr. Finn said. “But I really do see this as a kind of natural evolution of a long-standing government activity.”

I’d like to see that, too. On the other hand, I’d argue that the ed department’s aggressive PR machine serves an important, under-appreciated role.

Readers of the Sunday New York Times find each week a rented column by union head Randi Weingarten, a space in which she typically appeals to the newspaper’s wide, influential readership to oppose sensible reforms. The Times and the city’s other dailies also run her (usually preposterous) comments any time Mayor Bloomberg or Schools Chancellor Joel Klein propose new ideas, a great many of which have real merit. And while Flypaper unequivocally has just cause when it elects on rare occasions to pillory a proposal out of the Big Apple, it’s equally clear that many of the bloggers falling under the Truth Squad’s watchful eye are guilty of employing the same warped logic that Weingarten wields on a regular basis.

Considering the proven power of unions and their supporters to wage effective media campaigns against important reforms in public education, it seems to me we should be asking not Why does the department of ed have such a big PR office?, but rather, Why has it taken this long for the department of ed to adequately staff its PR office?

According to New York Sun reporter Elizabeth Green, Flypaper is among two-dozen education blogs being monitored by the city ed department’s new “Truth Squad,” composed of press secretary David Cantor, five of his deputies, and a deputy communications director, Melody Meyer. Ms. Meyer seems to have drawn the plum assignment; she’s on the Flypaper beat.

I’ve already been set aright once by Mr. Cantor himself. Here’s wishing Ms. Meyer a light workload in the future.

There’s been a development in New York City’s “rubber room” controversy. According to the Daily News, the Department of Ed has agreed to hire more arbitrators and tighten investigation procedures in an effort to expedite the cases of teachers put on prohibition for misconduct.

While my esteemed colleague may not be buying the numbers coming out of the Big Apple, parents and students are. Mayor Bloomberg announced today that a survey of parents and students revealed that a “vast majority” (according to the New York Times) of New Yorkers were “satisfied” with their schools. While we can only hope the results of said survey may prove to be worth their whopping two-million-dollar price tag, the real kicker was the response of Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, to the finding that 94 percent of parents surveyed were happy with their child’s teacher:

“The fact that parents think so highly of their children’s teachers also indicates how selfless our educators are,” Ms. Weingarten said. “They give their all despite feeling that the central administration isn’t listening to their concerns.”

Did I miss something? Here’s a thought. Maybe the reason parents are happy with their teachers is that Bloomberg’s system works and teachers are responding in kind.

New York City’s experiences in the last couple weeks reinforce my belief that the notion that we can “hold public schools accountable for results” is questionable.

No one bought the district’s announcement that test scores have dramatically improved. And why should they have? The doubters seem to understand that politicians who pledge to raise student achievement are heavily motivated to make it appear that they’ve raised student achievement—even if they really haven’t.

What puzzles, though, is that this sage observation seems to have died at the doorsteps of Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein. The skeptics blame these particular politicians as if the perverse incentive to varnish test scores afflicted only certain snaky individuals rather than all holders of public office. Why is that? Why when public servants invariably fall prey to the sinister tug of politics do we blame the individuals and never politics?

The forthcoming debate between Sol Stern and Chris Cerf, over at Eduwonk, should be must-see blogging.

Does anyone out there believe that the dramatic test-score increases coming out of the Empire State are legitimate? Sol Stern, for one, highly-knowledgeable on all educational goings on in New York, is with the naysayers. He points out in a piece on the City Journal website that

almost none of the dramatic improvements in the state tests show up in the most recent tests administered by the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), otherwise known as the “nation’s report card.” NAEP scores in fourth- and eighth-grade reading and eighth-grade math in New York State remained flat from 2005 to 2007.

Many critics have jumped on this embarassing comparison already. But Stern also illuminates this dubious idea of “rigorous peer review,” which state schools chief Richard Mills has used to try to deflect the inevitable charges of test-rigging:

One of the slides in his PowerPoint presentation was titled ENSURING THESE RESULTS ARE ACCURATE and claimed that “New York’s testing system passed rigorous peer review by [the] U.S. Dep’t of Education.” But this “rigorous peer review,” which all 50 states now undergo under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), is less impressive than it sounds. I was told by a federal education department official that the review covers only the general process used by the states in establishing a reliable system of standards and assessment. It does not constitute a federal seal of approval for the accuracy of any state’s particular tests.

That’s not really a surprise, considering how forgiving the feds have been on pretty much all of NCLB’s most important requirements. What is suprising is that most everyone still believes this unwieldy law can be dramatically improved during the next go-round and that, somehow, politicians at all levels will lose the motivation to game high-stakes tests.

Mayor Bloomberg will announce today that test scores are way up in New York City. But no one, it seems, thinks the gains are legitimate.

Mike and Checker, who were at the Excellence in Education summit in Orlando yesterday, may have more to say about this. Apparently New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, speaking at the summit, discussed the possibility of his seeking the power to certify principals and teachers, currently the province of ed schools alone. Call him reckless or brash or whatever you will, but Klein has done more than any other district leader in recent memory to bust the monopoly that has stifled change and innovation in public schooling.

Several New York City high school principals are receiving performance bonuses under the terms of an old program even though their schools fared poorly under the district’s new grading system. The old program uses the same tests as the new one but apparently sets lower achievement benchmarks.

The UFT is upset about this:

“It’s a cockeyed situation,” said teachers union president Randi Weingarten. “One set of metrics can generate a bonus and yet a separate set of metrics for the same exact school can generate an F. It just shows that using one set of data as the be-all and end-all just doesn’t make [sense].”

It’s cockeyed, for sure, but the real problem isn’t that they’re using one set of data. The problem is that the district keeps casting its accountability systems in concrete rather than soft, malleable Play-Doh. High-performing organizations are flexible enough to adapt to changing external circumstances and agile enough to carry out internal adjustments on the fly.

Public school districts will never do either of these things truly well since they’re largely chained to the inertia of the political process, but some government agencies have proved that they can slim down and smarten up when finally impelled to do so by the competition. Maybe someday this will happen in the schools sector.

As part of its effort to trim $200 million from its budget, the New York City Department of Ed will take down a notch its plan to expand screening programs for gifted and talented pupils.

(Look for more on high-achieving students in an upcoming Fordham report.)

The United Federation of Teachers is protesting a teacher’s removal to one of New York City’s famed “rubber rooms.”

The president of the union, Randi Weingarten, said yesterday that Mr. Brown was asked to leave the school last week after he criticized his principal in front of one of her supervisors.

“She won’t ever meet with me or talk to me,” Mr. Brown told the supervisor, according to Ms. Weingarten.

“This is the worst abuse of the rubber room,” Ms. Weingarten said. “This is a principal who wants her way, and if she doesn’t get her way, she’ll go to every length.”

A spokesman for the city’s Department of Education, Andrew Jacob, declined to specifics of the case, but he said the principal had not reassigned the teacher to a rubber room alone.

“Before he was reassigned, the principal reviewed the situation with our legal office, and they approved the reassignment, and they’re in the process of preparing charges,” Mr. Jacob said.

Unions are wrong about a lot of things, but it probably is indeed the case that some principals value loyalty over competence and consequently make stupid personnel decisions. Most of them attained leadership positions by toeing the district line, and now they expect the same obedience from their employees. Thus, a New York City teacher who’s smart enough to realize how poorly-run her school is has to hold her tongue or risk having it ripped out.

So well done on the diagnosis, UFT, but your prescription is more likely to kill the patient than cure it. Protesting controversial personnel decisions so that they’ll go to a never-ending arbitration process where the union’s definition of “due process” makes it near-impossible to actually fire anyone is not the way to fix a complex bureaucracy rife with management problems. What’s needed is better principals who demand high performance, not fawning, from their faculties and staffs—principals who can be trusted to hire and fire the right people.

At a news conference yesterday, New York City teachers union boss Randi Weingarten called Joel Klein’s protestations over Albany’s inflexibility on school funding the “height of chutzpah.”

Beautiful. It’s alliterative (more or less, depending on how you pronounce the Yiddish/Hebrew “ch”), elegantly cadenced, and well-suited to its demographic context. That’s how you do a sound bite.

Andy Rotherham might not want to throw Randi tough questions, but D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee was more than happy to do so, standing up to ask a question about Randi’s dishonest defense of NYC’s “rubber rooms” and Absent Teacher Reserve. And yes, it ruffled Randi, who cut her off repeatedly, and then just said that The New Teacher Project’s recent report on the subject “had no relationship to the truth.” Finally, some excitement!

Update: Now former NYC city council member and regular Randi-basher Eva Moskowitz is asking a question and just said she’s disappointed that “the gloves aren’t being taken off.” Now we’re getting somewhere!

Backed against the wall by recent labor controversies, the United Federation of Teachers has launched a counter-offensive:

The city teachers union is accusing education officials of using a double standard by yanking teachers from classrooms when they’re accused of wrongdoing but letting similarly accused principals stay on.

The complaint seems to stem from a single incident in the Bronx where a principal was accused of employing corporal punishment but has not been disciplined.

Two things jump out here. First, why take for granted that managers should be held to the same standards as other employees? Principals—just like movie-theater managers, law firm partners, and vice presidents for national programs and policy at education think tanks—have different duties and responsibilities than the employees they lead. Central administrators, therefore, should have different criteria for evaluating the performance and behavior of principals and teachers. It’s not a double standard—it’s an entirely different set of standards, and it’s a perfectly sensible approach for any hierarchical organization.

On the other hand, in practice, most urban school district central offices seem to do a pretty poor job of overseeing their principals (although some are trying to buck the trend). The UFT may very well be right that the principal in question deserves some kind of punishment. And I suspect (thanks to feedback from an NYC teacher) that there are several teachers in the rubber rooms and on the Absent Teacher Reserve who are there not because they’re poor teachers, but because they worked under poor principals who reward loyalty and punish initiative and independent thinking.

In short, the UFT may be wrong to push for teachers and principals to be held to the same standards, but both certainly need to be held to higher standards.

Birthday-boy Coby beat me to the punch, but here you go.

Regarding the Absent Teacher Reserve controversy, Randi rants:

“The chancellor should stop his grandstanding. The chancellor’s ideology of simply wanting to fire people at whim-regardless of fairness, reasons for displacement or statutory/contractual obligations-have gotten him into this mess. To pretend the union hasn’t tried to offer solutions is just wrong.”

How fitting that Randi admits in her own statement that “statutory/contractual obligations” might be related to something other than fairness (otherwise, why mention them both?). And speaking of fairness, what’s not fair is that taxpayers have to keep paying the salaries of people who don’t work and probably can’t teach. Maybe those taxpayers should get some “contractual” protections of their own.

* Last week’s here.

There’s more on the Absent Teacher Reserve and rubber room controversies in New York City. In today’s Daily News, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and union head Randi Weingarten blame each other for the impasses, which will lead to budget cuts next year.

Klein:

“Those are dollars we could give to schools to deal with issues,” Klein said, a week before he expects to tell schools how much they’ll lose next year.

Asked if the idle teachers were connected to the cuts, Klein said, “Of course, and I would tell [teachers union President] Randi [Weingarten], instead of making this a PR campaign, we get serious about addressing it.”

Weingarten:

“The chancellor should stop his grandstanding,” Weingarten said in a statement. “The chancellor’s ideology of simply wanting to fire people at whim—regardless of fairness, reasons for displacement or statutory/contractual obligations—have gotten him into this mess. To pretend the union hasn’t tried to offer solutions is just wrong.”

First, with regard to the “grandstanding” line, I’m reminded of that scene from The Godfather, Part II, where Michael sagely reminds Senator Geary that they’re both part of the same hypocrisy. Weingarten could use a similar reminder.

More absurd, however, are Weingarten’s continued attempts to attach the stigma of “ideology” to a proposal that seeks to impose at least the rudiments of an accountability system on New York’s schools. Does she really believe that Joel Klein’s proposal to shut down the money-sucking rubber rooms is part of a sinister, dogma-fueled master plan to let principals “fire people at whim”?

Looks like the United Federation of Teachers is not going to back down on the Absent Teacher Reserve issue. (Background here.) Yesterday the union sent the New York Sun a data analysis that challenges claims by The New Teacher Project that educators on the Reserve list are sitting around doing nothing, sapping the district of $81 million. The UFT claims that a third of 665-or-so Reserve teachers are actually teaching and that the drain on the district is closer to $18 million.

The other side isn’t buying it:

“I believe this is a red herring of the first order,” Deputy Chancellor Christopher Cerf said. “I believe there is no possibility that her number is accurate.”

The president of the New Teacher Project, Timothy Daly, said he knew of no way to collect data on precisely what ATR members are doing inside schools.

“Why didn’t I hear about this before now if this is a widespread problem?” Mr. Daly said.

A year ago today the Village Voice published a lengthy article on the New York City public schools’ so-called “rubber rooms,” where teachers accused of misconduct are held while their cases are pending. The story is so outrageous it seemed worth revisiting. Frankly, tales like this make it hard to fathom just how poorly-run are many public school districts.

Rubber room hours match that of a typical school day—Argyris would sign in at 8:30 a.m. and be released at 3:20 in the afternoon, with a 50-minute lunch break. Like something out of a dystopian fairy tale, however, this school had no children, just a few cafeteria workers, social workers, and custodians who shared the same lot.

In 2000, there were 385 teachers assigned to rubber rooms. Last month, that number had climbed to 662. Argyris, while she sat and stared at a wall, was paid $62,646 a year. The DOE pays about $33 million a year just in salaries to the teachers in rubber rooms—an amount that doesn’t include the salaries of investigators working on the cases of rubber room teachers, the upkeep of the reassignment centers, or the substitute teachers who replace employees like Argyris.

Some teachers spend up to three years in the rubber rooms while their cases float glacially through the district offices. They spend their time reading, playing chess, working on screenplays, knitting—one couple who met in a rubber room “had converted a corner of the room into a small love nest, complete with air mattress, sleeping bags, small fridge, and a portable DVD player.”

These are the kinds of things that happen when government has a monopoly on schools. People come to support school choice not because they’re dogmatically married to the idea of free markets, but because experience shows that public bureaucracies are inherently prone to such incompetent management as this story depicts.

Think about it: No organization that actually had to keep an eye on the efficiency of its operations in order to survive would do something as stupid as paying hundreds of employees $60,000 a year to sit in a room doing nothing all day.

To impose that kind of pressure and accountability on a public school district, on the other hand, requires a tremendous amount of concerted political will, which is perpetually right around the corner—i.e., it never actually materializes.

Those intrigued/outraged should also check out www.rubberroommovie.com, which features a trailer for an upcoming documentary on the rubber rooms.