Stat of the day

The two national teachers’ unions — the American Federation of Teachers and the larger National Education Association — together have more than 4.6 million members. That is roughly a quarter of all the union members in the country.

This is in a lengthy piece by Steven Brill on education reforms and The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand. ht

Of course, Brill is following up on his earlier piece on the battle over NY's worst teachers, which he discussed in the New Yorker essay on the Rubber Room. Of all places, it was in Tanzania that I discussed the Rubber Room essay--at a serendipitous Christmas Supper at the home of an American expat couple.  Despite all of us being liberals, we were all unanimous in our shock/unpleasantness over:

The Rubber Rooms house only a fraction of the 1.8 per cent who have been rated unsatisfactory. The rest still teach. There are fifty Rubber Roomers—a twentieth of one per cent of all New York City teachers*—awaiting removal proceedings because of alleged incompetence, as opposed to those who have been accused of misconduct.
“If you just focus on the people in the Rubber Rooms, you miss the real point, which is that, by making it so hard to get even the obvious freaks and crazies that are there off the payroll, you insure that the teachers who are simply incompetent or mediocre are never incented to improve and are never removable,” Anthony Lombardi says. In a system with eighty-nine thousand teachers, the untouchable six hundred Rubber Roomers and eleven hundred teachers on the reserve list are only emblematic of the larger challenge of evaluating, retraining, and, if necessary, weeding out the poor performers among the other 87,300.