350: Human Resources

Chris

That period lasted for maybe five or six years.

Chris

Oh it was a very long time. It was very, very depressing.

Chris

The whole unit I was in at that time, the organization decided that they were going to fold that unit and not be in that business directly.

Chris

No, it wasn't that way. Pretty much all of us took a turn. We were all in the wrong seat eventually. I'd say 90% of us, anyway.

Chris

I would never use it. I think that's something that-- I think that's an unhelpful and kind of a dated concept. If you've done it skillfully, they're going to feel that there was a parting of the ways, there was an exit of the unit, or whatever the factors are. I know when I received a package, I came through the door and said, "Hey, I've been exited. I got a package. They're closing down the unit." And I hadn't actually thought of myself as being fired for a second.

Chris

Well it feels bad, obviously. And it's a painful thing. Many people had grown up there for years. And this was their life as well as their role and their job. And before you get there, they know. I mean the jungle drums are out there. And you walk into a call center, there isn't a receptionist. You walk down the halls and past the desks, and people will kind of look at you.

Chris

That's happened, yes. I've had people say, is this the executioner? It's not-- you know they're wondering, is it going to be me? How's it going to impact my life?

Chris

Yes.

Chris

OK, OK. Hi, Ira. How are you?

Chris

Good, good. Ira, this is going to be a difficult conversation. I want to let you know that up front. You know we've been going through serious changes in the market environment over the last 12, 18 months. And so the organization, I think as you know, is making some decisions to downsize. And I have the bad news for you, which is that you're part of that downsizing. So you know your role--

Chris

And I'd like to tell you a little bit about the support that we're going to provide for you in terms of salary continuation, and medical coverage, and things like that.

Chris

It just comes out that way because you start with the facts. And you also need to be careful about what you say. So you don't want to enrage the person on a personal level. So you really want to keep it calm and talk much more about their exit package.

Chris

Sure.

Chris

It's not a comfortable thing. It's not a comfortable thing.

Chris

No. It's never comfortable. It's something, I don't think-- you can do it 100 times and it still feels bad. And I think it's because at the end of the day, people have much less control than organizations do in the world of work. The actual job finding processes are still pretty antiquated for individuals, whereas organizations can have recruiters and search firms, and advertise, and et cetera, et cetera. An individual, they're kind of like a little boat in a big sea. And they're going to bob around there. And they're going to have to scratch together a living again.

Anonymous Teacher

It's kind of embarrassing. The first two days as I'm sitting down there, I was naive enough to say to the secretary, about what time do you think I'll be meeting with somebody? And she's like, well, you're just going to sit there until you do meet with somebody. And then at the end of the second day, I'm like, this is crazy. I mean, I have an after school Regents Prep program to help the kids with the Regents Exam. I'm like, this is nuts. These kids have to take a Regents Exam. They're like a week away. And then eventually the light goes on over your head as you start meeting other people that are sitting there too. And you realize, all right, this is going to be a long term kind of thing.

Anonymous Teacher

The environment has a culture all its own. And when you're there long enough-- like I was there for a year. When you're there long enough, you see the stages of the culture. New people sit there, and are very quiet, and say nothing to anybody under any circumstances. And then a couple weeks go by, they realize OK, I guess I'm going to be here for a while. I might as well start getting relaxed. A lot of people come in with suit and tie because they figure they're going to meet with somebody immediately, and then get back into the classroom, because they think this whole thing is a joke. What am I here for in the first place?

So once it dawns on them that you're going to be here for a while, then they start to loosen up. They don't dress as nice. They realize, I've got to be comfortable because I'm going to be sitting down in a room for six hours. Then on stage three, you start opening up, you start talking to people, you start interacting. What you like? Oh, I like doing crossword puzzles. You start building bonds with people.

Iago Kier

My ?] name is [? Iago Kier ?]. I'm 32 years old. I was an English teacher in the Bronx for three years.

Grace Colon

My name is Grace Colon. I've been a teacher in New York City for 16 years. I'm starting my second year in the rubber room.

Jonathan

My name is Jonathan. I was a teacher in the New York City public school system for one month and in the rubber room for four months. Yeah. I spent much longer in the rubber room than I did in the classroom.

Iago Kier

I ?] was under a lot of stress at work. I was three months into teaching. And I rolled into work that day, it was two days after my 29th birthday. And I was going from group to group, helping them out if they had answers with the prompts, things like that. I'm sitting down with one particular group, and they're all speaking really loudly and I'd not paid attention. And the classroom and turned into a chaos. The next thing I know, I'm screaming, I'm cursing, I am basically unhinged. And I picked up a chair. And I threw it at a blackboard. And I didn't really get a lot of torque on it. I didn't really release it like I wish I could have. And it bounced off a wall and on the way down nicked a student. I then left the classroom. I just couldn't believe what I had done. I went and splashed cold water on my neck. And I just tried to assess just what I had done, you know. I remember going back into the classroom. And to them it was-- well I mean, looking at it objectively, to them, it must have been-- not fun per se-- but hugely entertaining to see an adult, someone in a position of power, completely lose their [BLEEP]. And then the next day, I'm taken out of the classroom and reassigned.

Grace Colon

My principal called me into the office just before Christmas, 2006. She had a paper. And she told me that I am being reassigned to a reassignment center. And I'm asking, what does this mean? What does reassignment center mean? Somebody looked at me and said, well, you're in the rubber room.

Jonathan

I said the word [BLEEP] in the hallway at my school in a conversation with another teacher. And unbeknownst to me, there was an open door nearby, and a classroom of eighth graders heard me. I knew that I was going to be in trouble. The principal pulled me aside on my way to my classroom and charged me with verbal abuse of a child. It's child abuse, verbal abuse. So she literally accused me of abusing a child by accidentally using a single four letter word. And I had no idea at that moment I would never see my students again. I had no idea.

Grace Colon

When I did go to the so-called reassignment center, you walk into a typical city office, almost like either welfare office, food stamp office. People walking around, trying to look busy, not making eye contact. You start thinking, where are you?

Iago Kier

And ?] there are about eight to 10 rooms. In every room there are about 10 people. And space is at a premium.

Grace Colon

I mean, you had the black corner, you had the Hispanic corner, you had the few white people that were scared to death. And so you have to make a quick decision, because everybody else is sort of looking you, sizing you up. Where do I go?

Jonathan

My first day there, I went in and I reported to the supervisor in charge. She said, well go find yourself a chair, but be careful because people are territorial, and, in fact, fights have broken out over chairs. And I thought to myself, what are you talking about? Fights-- people-- fights breaking out among teachers over chairs? And I went and I saw-- the first open seat I saw, I went and I sat down in it. And I opened up my book. And the person next to me said, you can't sit there. That's blah-blah-blah's seat. And I said, well where's blah-blah-blah? He said, well, he didn't come in, because it's Friday and he wanted the three day weekend. And I said, well, when he comes in, we could talk about it then. So she got up and left the room. And a minute later she came back and she said, I found you a seat. I got you a seat. You'll like it better there, I can see you like to read. It's a quieter room. So I thought that's a friendly thing to do. And she went and took me in the other room and she asked my name. And she said, everybody this is Jonathan. And she went around the room. And she introduced me to everyone in the room. And she said, here's your chair. And sure enough, there was an empty chair. And then she left. And I went and I sat down. And the woman a couple of chairs away said, you can't sit there. That's blah-blah-blah's seat.

And I want to emphasize, I was not in a good mood. I was not happy to be there. I didn't know what was going on with me. I was I was feeling hostile. And well, I'm kind of a big guy. And this is a rather petite woman some years older than me. And I leaned right over and I got in her face. I said, now you listen to me. I'm going to sit in that chair. And if anybody doesn't like it, if anybody's got a problem about it, you send them right to me and we'll talk about it. And I sat right down, and I opened my book. And she gave me a dirty look and didn't say anything. So I sat in that very same chair every day. And that was my chair. And sometimes I could get an empty chair and put it in front of me and turn it around and use it as a table. And that was nice.

Gail Friedman

My ?] name is [? Gail Friedman. ?] I am now in the rubber room. And I've been in there since February of 2007. The children don't know what happened to me. They might have thought maybe I moved away or I went to another school. You're just not there anymore.

Pete Sinclair

You're in this forgotten little place. My name is Pete Sinclair, but that's really not my name. And I have been in the rubber room for about a year and a half. It's that feeling of lack of momentum, of anything moving. It's like purgatory. And time just goes by. And everyone is just sort of playing cards.

Gail Friedman

It's just like you sit and wait. As if you'd be in a waiting room, except that you're waiting for months. Sometimes people wait for years. You just wait.

Grace Colon

When I first come in to the rubber room in the mornings, I look at the papers. Then I look through my bag, I usually stick bills and stuff, my checkbook.

Iago Kier

You just kind of go there, you sign in, you sit down, you stare at the wall. You get into a conversation with somebody. You make a phone call. You check your stocks if you want.

Grace Colon

Some people play cards. Some people gossip. Some people have portable VCRs. They look at movies.

Jonathan

And then there were little classes that were held. I took Spanish classes from a Spanish teacher. There were drawing classes. There was a book club, very popular. And they would meet twice a week for 90 minutes. And you would have 20 people in this little room that housed the refrigerator and the microwave. And they'd be talking about the novel or what have you. But you know, that might be three or four hours a week. Even if you did all the activities, it's just a few hours a week.

Iago Kier

And there are a lot of people who would just bring in pillows and would sleep all day.

Pete Sinclair

No lesson plans, no homework, no papers to grade, no dealing with parents, no dealing with screaming kids.

Iago Kier

And indeed there are teachers and reverence for years collecting the salary for a job that they're not doing.

Jonathan

And for some people that's not so bad. If you really hated teaching, and you really liked playing cards, the money's the same.

So yeah, the noise for me might have been the worst part of actually being there. And the sound of it was really the most distinctive thing of it. I wanted to get a souvenir. I brought in a little digital voice recorder. So I just laid the recorder down on the table. I'll play it for you.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

It's very crowded, the acoustics are terrible, very echoey. And teachers like to talk.

Woman

I agree. We're off from what society condones as the norm.

Jonathan

Like at a loud party, where you're talking to somebody and after a while you realize that you're both shouting. And then you realize that everybody in the room is shouting.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

Pete Sinclair

It's really difficult to sit there and try to read or get anything done when people are yelling, or fighting, or screaming over a missing bottle of jelly in the refrigerator.

Grace Colon

You have people that are in denial. You have people that are angry. You have people that have shut down. You have people that have introverted into not even speaking. They just come in and exist.

Jonathan

I mean there are some really nutty people in there.

Grace Colon

You don't want to make eye contact. There have been a lot of fights. The dumbest stuff. Someone went into the refrigerator and stole someone's butter. There have been arguments over paper, over someone stealing someone's pen.

Jonathan

Some of the people in the room like the lights off because it's more restful and maybe they even want to sleep. And the rest of the people want the lights on, because they want to read or play cards. So somebody will get up and turn the lights off. And somebody else will get up and turn the lights back on. It's a conflict of wills.

There were fights, a couple of fights. I heard them because they'd be going on, say, in the room next door in the hallway, and then everybody would spill out into the hallway to go watch.

Grace Colon

It's a prison type of culture. If you go out of your comfort zone then people will mess with you. Let's say if I were to go to the white area and decide I want their chair and stuff. The people there are going to look out for their chairs. And so there will be a confrontation. You want to be very careful not to step on anybody's space, because space seems to be the last control. That's the last thing they have control over.

Jonathan

People fight over the few things that there are to fight over, such as territory. It's this amazing thing because one of the more popular members of the group went back to her school. She got sent back. And there were literally tearful farewells. There were flowers. There was cake. Goodbye, goodbye. And before the end of the day, somebody had claimed her seat. And everybody had kind of moved up in the pecking order, territorially. It's not so much the chair as it is the real estate it sits upon. So what you want is a nice spot. It's nice to sit near a window. It makes a difference whether there's some shrieking banshee four feet away from your ear. It makes a difference whether the light fixture flickers. I mean, you're going to be there for seven hours a day, five days a week. You wouldn't think it would make so much of a difference. But you're there for a long time, so it does.

Iago Kier

The ?] strangest feeling is getting up in the morning with a purpose-- taking a shower, brushing your teeth, having that first cigarette, getting on the train, dealing with all these commuters-- to show up to work to do nothing. And I think I think it's made that way. I think that's kind of the point. They punish you with boredom.

Jonathan

It's kind of an indelicate question to ask somebody how long they've been there. It's a little bit like asking somebody what they're in for. It's embarrassing. It's humiliating.

Iago Kier

After ?] about a week of going there and reading all day, you begin to realize that there is no cavalry. There is no one coming in your defense. There's no one beating down the door, saying, give us back our teacher. There's no one making phone calls to clear your name. And that's when it hits you. That's when you realize, holy crap, I could be here indefinitely.

Grace Colon

When you first start out, you're in denial. And you're sort of frozen. You have no emotion. I think that went on for me for maybe two to three months. And then after six months, at that point we had our summer vacation. You come back, and then you get angry all over again. Here you are, starting again, yet a new school semester, in this limbo.

Iago Kier

The thing with the Department of Education, it's such a large system. A million kids, a million students. If you begin to think about it, it's staggering.

Jonathan

There are 70,000 teachers. So even if 700 have these Kafka-esque things happening to them, that's still only one in 100. Wait, that is a lot. 1%.

Iago Kier

I feel that the Department of Education, in many ways, is hiding a secret. The rubber room.

Dan Weisberg

I certainly hear the term rubber room thrown around. I use the phrase reassignment center. Temporary reassignment center. My name is Dan Weisberg. I'm the chief executive labor policy for the New York City Department of Education. I don't doubt that there are teachers in the reassignment centers who believe, A, they didn't do anything wrong, or there are teachers there who think that what they did really doesn't warrant the punishment, as they see it, of being reassigned. In some cases those are difficult decisions. But we are entrusted with the safety of over a million kids, including, by the way, mine. The benefit of the doubt has to go to the kids. We're not an auto company. We're not an accounting firm. We're dealing with something unique, and that is the well being of children.

Sam Freedman

My sense is that there's been a more aggressive policy about trying to bring teachers up on charges, and as a result the numbers of people going into the rubber room have increased a lot lately. I'm Sam Freedman and I write the On Education column for the New York Times. And I've been covering education on and off for about 30 years. There are many incompetent, and some abusive and exploitative teachers who are totally deserving of having their licenses taken away, and who should be never allowed to be in the presence of children.

That said, this is still not the humane way to deal with them. And it has also, in my view, not been an effective way of separating out who's facing legitimate accusations and who's there because of a grudge with a principal and is otherwise an entirely capable educator. There isn't a whole lot they can do about it, except to have their day in court, or more exactly, have their date with a hearing officer.

Grace Colon

I'm starting my second year in the rubber room. I'm waiting to have my hearing.

Iago Kier

My case was very, very different. In my case, I had a principal who was willing to go to bat for me. After two weeks I was reinstated and allowed to come back and teach.

Jonathan

Well, I fully expect to be fired. And I've got another job. By most measures it's a better job. I'll make a little more money. I have a little more responsibility. There's more room for advancement. But it's not what I chose. I chose to teach in the public schools. And I don't think I'm going to make the kind of difference in people's lives, doing what I'm going to be doing, that I could have made teaching.

Maria Jones

We have a great principal, wonderful teachers, everybody knows one another. The parents work well, an active PTA body. We love this school.

Maria Jones

Our enrollment has been building. And then the other thing, failing test scores. We are not failing at all. We are 15th in reading out of 81 District of Columbia public elementary schools. We are in the top 20 percentile in math out of all 81 elementary schools.

Maria Jones

It's an anchor. Isn't it beautiful?

Maria Jones

What the community is saying is that it must be a land grab. Because if you look all the way down into 20th Street and all the way down to 18th, this is one beautiful long block. And then we have this great green field that's just there for kids to play on. And everybody knows that the developers have converged upon DC and are just going after the property that they want. So this has got to be one of those scenarios. What else can it be? We're not failing. We're a model school.

Maria Jones

It doesn't seem like a conspiracy, some hidden conspiracy. It seems like an out and out plan for displacement. Especially when you have other buildings-- like the Pierce School, Lovejoy, and some of the other buildings-- that have been turned into condos, that have clearly been closed as schools and opened up with the same structure as million dollar condos that people are living in now.

Valerie Leonard

My dad has been telling me this for years. I am 44 years old. I can remember when I was growing up my dad would always say, well you know, Valerie, there's a plan. There's a plan.

Valerie Leonard

He was saying this in the '60s and the '70s. You know, this may be a black neighborhood now. But there's a plan on the books that they're going to displace black people and push enough people out so that it's only 25% black. And I said, mm-hmm. You wouldn't believe him, because my dad was one of those conspiracy theorists. And lo and behold, I'm an adult now, and everything that he said is coming to fruition.

Valerie Leonard

I think one of them was planned neglect, that they would just let it run down to nothing, which was true, and let it be overcome with crime. And then once the community runs down, they'll come back and grab the land at a much cheaper price and rebuild it for their own people.

Edmond Louis

Yeah, there were community activists who were invited into the school. I remember some of the Black Panthers in New Orleans visiting the school. And yeah, they talked about how whites definitely wanted the city back, they wanted control. I remember Reverend Avery C. Alexander, one of the pioneers of the civil rights movement in New Orleans and an activist minister who-- he came to the school. And he said there are some beautiful homes in the neighborhood where the school is, and basically that they want to move young white professionals into this neighborhood and move black people out.

Marcel Diallo

And some of the things that I was hearing as early as the '80s, back in the crack era, was that-- all the elders in my family would always say, oh, you think they're paving that road for us? You think they're fixing that park for us? The white people got their eye on this place. And they're coming back. That was like urban lore. That was the folklore growing up, that white people one day were going to return and try to kick us out.

Jabari Zakiya

I almost really believe, literally, that when these city council people get close to being elected-- because DC is basically a democratic town. If you win the primary, you're going to win, right? So they see who's going to win the primary. And they get that little call at night, saying look, we want to see you. And they take you to that little room and sit you down, say look, this is the deal.

Jabari Zakiya

To me, the black members aren't any much different than the white members. In fact, many of the white ones seem to be more progressive than the black ones. I mean look, we've never had a white mayor.

Marjorie Rhode

I think it's the plan of any of those people who want to make money.

Marjorie Rhode

?] Let us move out the people who are not going to give us profit. And that begins to break right along racial lines. So whether the plan is to move black people out, it doesn't matter. That's the net effect.

Marjorie Rhode

?] That is such a mouth-watering piece of land. So it's hard not to believe that behind closed doors, somebody's really looking at that land. My somewhat paranoid theory, perhaps, is that they're letting the buildings deteriorate. And they're not doing much to support its enrollment. We're not up to date in terms of a lot of our technology and so forth. And then they can say, well, see.

Marjorie Rhode

No neglect is benign. It's always malignant. And one of the buildings they took was where we had the art department, the music and so forth. Wonderful building, wonderful building. They took us out of it supposedly to renovate it. It is now lofts, condos. OK?

Charles Brown

Just look around. You don't have to believe anything I say. Just look around. That's all you have to do. Just take a look. If you're in Harlem, if you're in Chicago, if you're in New Orleans, if you're in Washington, if you're in LA, I don't care where you are. The plan has worked.

Charles Siebert

We need them because, first of all, there are over 3,000 chimps in the United States. Now, among those would be pets, entertainers, and former research lab chimpanzees. We have, actually, a surplus of research lab chimps in the United States. And the reason for that is when AIDS was-- the first big outbreak, it was sort of logically assumed that chimps would offer us a possible cure because they share so much of our DNA. That turned out to be bogus. Chimps can't get human AIDS.

So anyway, we ended up with all these excess breeded chimps that could not be used for AIDS research and for no other research. And so there was this surplus. And the government-- this was near the end of Clinton's administration-- was actually faced with this, I guess, moral, ethical dilemma. What do you do with all these near humans? We can't just euthanize them. And so one of the last acts of the Clinton administration was the Chimp Act. And they actually came up with the idea to build a government-funded retirement home outside of Shreveport, Louisiana. I went to this place. When I first saw it, I thought this is sort of the Jurassic Park of chip retirement. This is the pinnacle of retirement homes for chimps.

Charles Siebert

These chimps have about a 4 to 5 year period of viability as actors. And then they just get too strong, too willful, too out of control.

Charles Siebert

Precisely. A chimpanzee, a full grown adult chimpanzee, is five times as strong as a human man. And especially male chimps are very, very volatile, and competitive, and aggressive. So for that one or two yuks that we get on television, they then spend another 40 to 50 years locked up somewhere because they're no longer usable.

Charles Siebert

Yes.

Charles Siebert

These are chimps that, the official word used is they've been inculturated. A lot of them have been eating off of caterers' tables, been only around humans. And they like us. They're very social animals and, especially if we're imprinted on them very early, they form very tight bonds. So the gradations would be-- I guess, the one extreme would be Cheeta's life. That would seem sort of like the human paradigm, a retirement home in Palm Springs, riding around in golf carts.

Charles Siebert

Yes, who is 75 now, although there is some dispute about whether he is actually that old. He's at a retirement home in Palm Springs. He was walking around the house. We sat out back by the swimming pool at a picnic table. He was eating Doritos and drinking diet iced tea. He's a diabetic. He goes into the living room, sits at the piano, bangs on the keys. There's a selection of his movies on the living room coffee table. And he has been given to watching his old movies on TV. He recognizes scenes. He gets up and he claps. He remembers.

Charles Siebert

Exactly. There's the one extreme. The humanoid version of chimp retirement. The opposite extreme would be the Center for Great Apes in Florida, where all the retired ape actors are. Or ape entertainers. Circus, TV, movies, and some pets. You have, basically, caged farce. You have these geodesic dome-like structures-- very tall and elaborate, and spacious-- where the chimps are nearly swinging through the trees. The whole ethos of that place, I suppose, would be that they're trying to get them as close back to a state of wild chimpdom as is possible.

Charles Siebert

It has bedrooms with swinging cots and patios. And they have in their rooms television, VCRs, CDs. And access through these little walkways to little moated forests. It's the most strange blend of the urban and the wild.

And you asked earlier about gradations of repatriation of chimps. Some of these chimps were born in captivity. Some were taken from the wild. And at Chimp Haven, what they try to do is get the remaining wild ones together with the totally captive born ones, so that the wild ones can teach the captive ones how to be chimps again. Some of the captive ones don't even know what a tree is. Some of the research ones have not even been around ground. They've been in cement cells all their lives, getting shots of different diseases. So they get released and they-- there's this one video I saw of a chimp who had never been on the earth before. And he wouldn't get out of his crate. He was touching down on the earth as though it were the moon. It was the most bizarre thing to see.

Charles Siebert

Tremendous success, actually. Over time, these chimps do very well. Have these days oddly bifurcated by chimp activities and human activities, and they live out a life of that kind of to and fro, between the two.

Charles Siebert

Well they have access to their little pie-shaped five acre wedges of forest. So they're out there swinging in the trees, and socializing with one another, and even doing a little crude form of food gathering.

Charles Siebert

They try to grow certain things in the forest that's conducive to things chimps would-- you know, fruits and berries, that kind of thing. But not really enough to sustain them, so they come back in for dinner. And meals, I mean they come for their three squares, which they have been used to getting. So that, to me, is a two-tiered kind of a day. Where you're playing chimp in the jungle, but you're coming back for dinner and watching some television. And these chimps are all inculturated. They've been around medical labs. They've been around doctors and researchers in white coats. So guess what their favorite television show is. General Hospital. So yes, they have access to the woods where they can go be chimps. But they like coming back to their room and watching television and being around people. So they're having this balance. And at one point, I said, so in a way, what you're saying to me is, it would be just as cruel to now fully excerpt them from human contact, given their history. And they said, yeah. They still need access to what they knew as they were reared.

Charles Siebert

Well, I've come to feel that it's the best we can do for them, given the circumstances. But in the best of worlds it should have never happened, that they just shouldn't be kidnapped from their lives for these purposes. And they live longer lives in captivity, but they're wild animals and they have their life. And in the course of doing this book and other articles, I've been in the wild and had a chance to see them in the wild.

Charles Siebert

I don't know. You feel a very deep stirring. I was running for hours through the woods and just hearing rampant chimp screams. Pods moving, they move with unbelievable felicity through the jungle, really fast. So I began to despair of ever catching up to them. And then suddenly, my guide put this quiet gesture in front of his mouth and pointed up. And there was a mother and a baby about 50 feet up high in a tree, and the baby is staring down at me. And I don't know. I just got chills. It just took my breath away. And I thought about it a lot afterwards, what that kind of meant. It really was very moving.

Chris

Ira, this is going to be a difficult conversation. I want to let you know that up front.