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.

New Jersey education officials have admitted that an African-American vice principal inappropriately punished 15 Hispanic elementary students in Camden. The principal forced the students in a fifth-grade bilingual class to spend a week eating their lunches while sitting on the gymnasium floor. This was “punishment” for behavioral problems in class.

Parents and activists claimed that the incident was another example of racism directed against Hispanics. State education officials, however, in a report released this week refute those allegations. Although the principal’s actions were insulting and demeaning to the students, the report says they were not biased because similar punishments have been meted out to non-Hispanics.

Prejudice is not the issue; common sense—or the lack of it—is. I’m all for greater principal autonomy. I’m also for stricter discipline in the classroom. If students are disrupting a school’s learning environment, they should be punished—and quite severely. Our schools have become way too lax in maintaining proper and respectful student behavior. But this principal’s actions are beyond the pale. Besides hygiene considerations (eating off a floor is a sure way to contract unhealthy bacteria and germs), the punishment was degrading. These kids are not animals, and they should not be treated as such.

Whatever happened to principals notifying parents of students’ disruptive, unruly behavior? If that doesn’t do the trick, there are other tried-and-true measures, such as after-school detention, suspension, or if the students are especially bad, expulsion. In short, there are many effective ways to enforce discipline and order without resorting to barbaric humiliation. This principal, whose name has not been released to the press, should be reprimanded, and told clearly and unequivocally that such practices are unacceptable.

Amidst criticism over her principal firings, D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee has dismissed the principal of the school that her own kids attend.

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.

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee will fire somewhere between 24 and 30 principals at the end of the school year, in large part because under the rules of NCLB she’s required to restructure 27 chronically-failing schools.

The head of the principals association, meanwhile, evidently finds it inconceivable that replacing a school’s leader could help improve its performance:

Frances M. Plummer, executive director of the D.C. Association of Elementary School Principals, called the firings “wholesale and heartless” and said Rhee was damaging the school system.

“To cut people loose at this juncture does not benefit children,” she said. “If you are about the children, you should be about the teachers and administrators, too.”

Is there, in Plummer’s mind, a juncture at which such firings would be appropriate, I wonder? At least this nonsense was buried at the bottom of the article.

So why did Miami-Dade superintendent Rudy Crew turn down a principal’s offer to work for a $1 salary? As paraphrased by the Miami Herald, he said it was because “a position budgeted at $1 a year plus benefits could not be filled if [the principal] left before year’s end.” To which the principal, replied, “New life has been thrust into this old body. With one more year, I could take these kids to the next level.”

It sounds like new life needs to be thrust into the Miami-Dade school district, which has a habit of tangling itself in bureaucratic knots.

“Dade principal’s $1-a-year pay offer turned down“

Fordham has argued that principals need to function more like CEOs, handling not just a school’s academic mission but also the many complexities of running a small organization. Yet when we asked principals how they view themselves and their responsibilities, we concluded that “they see their role as ‘middle manager’—not CEO.”

Now the National Association of Elementary School Principals weighs in. NAESP’s “Vision 2021″ predicts that by the year 2021—the hundredth anniversary of NAESP—principals will be CLOs, or Chief Learning Officers. As reported in Education Week, “In those schools of the future, principals will shift away from a managerial role,” using new technologies, focusing on data, and developing “learning communities.” But who will run the school as an organization? Here the NAESP gets timid:

Some experts argue that no one person can do the job of principal and new structures are required, like a team of leaders including a business manager or chief of operations and a chief academic officer. Whatever the future configuration, principals will practice learner-centered leadership and seek leadership contributions from multiple sources to balance management and leadership roles.

“Leadership contributions”? Someone needs to be in charge of the school as a whole, to make sure that the school’s finances, staffing, facilities, and instructional model are in synch. So who’s the boss? If the NAESP is any indication, it seems we were right—today’s principals aren’t exactly clamoring for this responsibility.

That Miami-Dade is considering convening a task force to investigate the testing mania that has reportedly caused some students to be hospitalized illustrates how little trust district officials often place in their principals. School Board member Solomon Stinson so noted. According to the Miami Herald, “he warned against micromanaging teachers and principals, who have a better grasp on student needs.”

About this and this (the possibility that New York’s principals would be disallowed from considering student test scores when evaluating whether teachers should receive tenure), the New York Times thinks:

It is an absurd ban that does a disservice to the state’s millions of public school students. The State Legislature should remove this language from the budget.

Who’s to blame?

Nobody in Albany would say who is behind this language. The driving force, however, is the powerful teachers’ union that gives lots of money and time to state campaigns.