The Rubber Room

 The battle over New York City’s worst teachers.

by Steven Brill August 31, 2009

In a windowless room in a shabby office building at Seventh Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street, in Manhattan, a poster is taped to a wall, whose message could easily be the mission statement for a day-care center: “Children are fragile. Handle with care.” It’s a June morning, and there are fifteen people in the room, four of them fast asleep, their heads lying on a card table. Three are playing a board game. Most of the others stand around chatting. Two are arguing over one of the folding chairs. But there are no children here. The inhabitants are all New York City schoolteachers who have been sent to what is officially called a Temporary Reassignment Center but which everyone calls the Rubber Room.

These fifteen teachers, along with about six hundred others, in six larger Rubber Rooms in the city’s five boroughs, have been accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or, in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent.

The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day—which is pretty much nothing at all. Watched over by two private security guards and two city Department of Education supervisors, they punch a time clock for the same hours that they would have kept at school—typically, eight-fifteen to three-fifteen. Like all teachers, they have the summer off. The city’s contract with their union, the United Federation of Teachers, requires that charges against them be heard by an arbitrator, and until the charges are resolved—the process is often endless—they will continue to draw their salaries and accrue pensions and other benefits.

Women's Rights in Iran

 Let's takes a real hard look at Islam in general and Iran in particular concerning womens rights. When the radical muslims took over Iran in 1979 they instituted the following:

*The country's progressive family laws were suspended,

*Disallowed female judges,

*Strongly enforced the wearing of the hijab,

*Lowered the marriage age to twelve,

*Permitted polygamy,

*Gave fathers the right to decide who their daughters could marry,

*Permitted unilateral divorce for men but not for women,

*And gave fathers sole custody of children in case of divorce.

*Forced to wear the hijab whenever in public.

*Lost the right to equal voting.

Overall, Iran's theocracy has been a disaster on multiple fronts, especially womens rights. And I cannot even speak about the ghastly deaths openly gay people face in Iran daily. That's what they are trying to free themselves from. Best wishes from the world to the Iranian people!

And yet most leftist in America fear a Christian theocratic takeover of the government; an absurdity as most Christians just want to be left alone and not have left-wing viewpoints shoved down their throats. People need to wake up and realize how dangerous muslims really are. And if muslims are getting bad press, it's because they are causing it themselves. Hell, muslims cannot get along with any of their neighbors: they attack Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, and Jews in every country they share them with. And it is not a modern occurrence; look up Arab muslims in northern Sudan attacking black Christians in southern Sudan in the 1970s for example. 

Just so you know.....