Rubber Rooms, Good Riddance

Gene Demby marks the closing of NYC's holding pens for unfireable teachers unfit to teach. Suspended teachers will now be "reassigned to the city's department of education offices, where they'll work until their cases are resolved":

Designating teachers as unfireable means any serious conversation about good and bad teachers -- of what they look like -- is essentially tabled. The end result is that the nation's largest public school system essentially grades all of its teachers "competent," leaving the difficult work of fixing schools undone in the face of maintaining polite fictions.