This Week’s Sign of the Apocalypse

It’s well known how difficult it is to fire a teacher in New York City. The process is lengthy: if a teacher receives a series of poor evaluations, the teacher is shipped off to the infamous “rubber rooms” where they wait for an offer to work at another school. If the offer never comes, and remember this is a teacher that somebody else wanted to fire, the district must wait a certain period of time and then begin arbitration hearings. Those are tedious. They require a lawyer paid $1,400 to $1,600 a day to serve as an arbitrator over cases that last many months. The Times is reporting that the New York City Department of Education (DOE) is in an uproar because one of the arbitrators, Adam L. Goldberg, apparently fell asleep at a hearing for a teacher named Darwin Bailey. It was after 1pm, the hearing had not adjourned for lunch, and Mr. Goldberg took a little snooze. Three DOE attorneys and two witnesses (including the testifying former principal of Mr. Darwin) observed the act. Goldberg himself admits to, literally, falling asleep on the job.

Mr. Goldberg’s on-the-job slumber is not the sign of the apocalypse. It is the fact that Mr. Bailey, a man fighting for his job as a teacher, a job that requires constant and focused attention on a group of students, is on record saying he did not notice Mr. Goldberg sleeping. If the city needs more evidence of incompetence, they just found it.

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One Response to “This Week’s Sign of the Apocalypse”

jac says:

November 12, 2009 at 11:18 am

zing!