NEW YORK City and its teacher unions have reached a deal to put an end to a bizarre and Kafkaesque system in which suspended teachers are placed in holding centres, dubbed “rubber rooms”, doing nothing on full pay in some cases for as long as 10 years.The rubber rooms - so nicknamed after the padded cells of old-style mental hospitals - have become a symbol of the unacceptable face of the city's education system, which is the largest in the US. Around 600 teachers are currently occupying the temporary reassignment centres, as they are officially known, in locations across the city, including a trailer site in Washington Heights.

From Monday to Friday during school hours the teachers sit in the rooms under instruction to do whatever they like, so long as it has nothing to do with teaching.

Some play Scrabble, read books or do yoga, others run small businesses on their laptops, and many wile away the hours by sleeping.

All the occupants are all on full-pay, at a cost to the city of at least $30m a year. The reasons cited for their confinement to what has been described as purgatory or jail for teachers range from excessive lateness or absence, sexual misconduct with a student, physical abuse, incompetence or use of drugs or alcohol.

What the occupants all have in common is that they are waiting for the charges against them to be filed and then adjudicated, a state of limbo that often lasts for two or three years, and occasionally much longer.

In some cases, teachers have been known to wait for three years before they are told what they are alleged to have done wrong.

The education department and the unions have traditionally blamed each other for the existence of the rubber rooms.

Management accused the unions of putting up so many barriers it becomes virtually impossible to sack bad or abusive teachers; the unions accused management of failing to invest in the resources needed to speed up the hearings process.

With media attention increasingly focusing on the phenomenon, including a documentary released this month called The Rubber Room by Five Boroughs Productions, both sides have now reached agreement on a way out of the embarrassing impasse.

The mayor, Michael Bloomberg, said “Fixing this broken process gets us all back to what we want to be doing, giving our kids the education they need and deserve.”

The head of the main union, the United Federation of Teachers, Michael Mulgrew, said “The rubber rooms are a symptom of a disciplinary process that has not worked for anyone - not the kids, not the schools, and not the teachers.”

Present occupants of the centres will have to wait until September until the new system comes into effect.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service