The headline reads "700 NYC teachers are paid to do nothing." Why has this happened? Administrative incompetence. However, the Associated Press makes it out to be the fault of the unions.
Those 700 teachers, and others like them across the country, are waiting for their chance to be heard. Each was involved in a disciplinary action, whether warranted or not, and, as a result, they are now forced to sit in rooms, "do[ing] nothing," and wait for for their hearing. Because they are contractual employees, the state cannot fire them without affording them that opportunity to be heard.
Fortunately for those teachers, they are unionized, and as part of the union rules their salaries must continue to be paid while they wait for due process. And it can be a long wait, sometimes years. Regarding the 700 teachers referenced in the headline:
Once their hearings are over, they are either sent back to the classroom or fired. But because their cases are heard by 23 arbitrators who work only five days a month, stints of two or three years in a rubber room are common, and some teachers have been there for five or six.
So the real news, here, is that the system is so slow that it is all but broken. But you wouldn't know that unless you read down to paragraph 20 of the article. No, the AP decided the really important news is the jolly ol' time these layabout teachers are having at the taxpayers' expense, thanks to cushy union contracts:
Hundreds of New York City public school teachers accused of offenses ranging from insubordination to sexual misconduct are being paid their full salaries to sit around all day playing Scrabble, surfing the Internet or just staring at the wall, if that's what they want to do.
Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them, the teachers have been banished by the school system to its "rubber rooms" — off-campus office space where they wait months, even years, for their disciplinary hearings.
Well before you read anything about why it takes so long, the AP gives space to the state Board of Education:
Because the teachers collect their full salaries of $70,000 or more, the city Department of Education estimates the practice costs the taxpayers $65 million a year. The department blames union rules.
"It is extremely difficult to fire a tenured teacher because of the protections afforded to them in their contract," spokeswoman Ann Forte said.
"If it weren't for those dastardly unions and their rules, we could just fire them and be done with it."
Never mind the fact that some of those teachers may have been falsely accused:
Many teachers say they are being punished because they ran afoul of a vindictive boss or because they blew the whistle when somebody fudged test scores.
"The principal wants you out, you're gone," said Michael Thomas, a high school math teacher who has been in a reassignment center for 14 months after accusing an assistant principal of tinkering with test results.
Most of the article is taken up with human-interest-esque descriptions of what these teachers do with their time. Thanks to the AP, though, instead of putting the blame with the broken administrative hearings system where the fault really lies, most people who read the article would pin it on the unions and on the teachers.