Few entities symbolize the mind-numbing tangle of challenges plaguing public education better than the New York City Department of Education’s Temporary Reassignment Centers, better known as the Rubber Room. In this piece published in The New Yorker, Steven Brill, founder of American Lawyer Magazine and CourtTV, expertly explores the education purgatory that is Rubber Room. As Brill explains, for years on end, teachers “accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or, in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent” report to the Rubber Room day after day to literally do nothing but wait for resolution, receiving a paycheck all the while. Brill’s article followed on the heels of this fantastic story aired a year earlier on the NPR radio program This American Life. In mid-April, the New York Times reported that Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the teachers unions plan to close the Rubber Rooms, “reforming a disciplinary system that has made both City Hall and the teachers’ union subjects of ridicule.”