Half a million dollars to fire one incompetent teacher isn’t a typo. It’s the system working exactly as designed.
There is a room in New York City where teachers get paid full salary, accrue pension credit, and show up every single day to do absolutely nothing. They read magazines. They sit. They collect a paycheck funded by taxpayers who think that money is going toward educating their kids. It is not. This is the rubber room, and it is one of the purest examples of government dysfunction operating exactly as the people who built it intended.
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Economist Thomas Sowell laid out the numbers with the kind of bluntness that makes bureaucrats squirm. Discussing a specific case, Sowell explained that it cost half a million dollars just to fire one incompetent teacher in Atherton, and noted dryly that most school districts simply do not have “a big enough budget” to do that repeatedly. (7:25) So they don’t. They let the incompetence sit there, fully paid, fully protected, while kids in the same district go without adequate supplies.
The Rubber Room Is Not a Metaphor
Sowell was explicit that this isn’t some abstract inefficiency buried in a budget report. He described entire staffs of teachers so incompetent that principals refuse to let them near a classroom, yet the system has no mechanism to actually remove them. Instead, districts warehouse them in what New York City itself calls the rubber room, paying them to do nothing while due process drags on for years. (7:17)
Ask yourself how any other profession survives that arrangement. Imagine a surgeon so unsafe that hospital administrators ban them from operating rooms, yet the hospital keeps paying full salary indefinitely because firing them is too expensive and too legally complicated. That would be a national scandal. In public education, it is Tuesday.
The Excuse That Never Holds Up
Every time someone points out this failure, the response from the education establishment is the same. There isn’t enough funding. Class sizes are too big. If only taxpayers would approve another bond measure, things would improve. Sowell dismantled that excuse directly, pointing to the millions spent every single year in New York alone paying teachers who show up but do not teach, money that could otherwise go toward actual instruction, materials, or facilities. (7:56)
This is the part school boards do not want parents doing the math on. The problem was never a lack of resources. The problem is that the resources are being burned on protecting failure instead of rewarding competence.
Why Nobody Fixes It
The most honest moment in the entire discussion comes when Sowell was asked whether it’s simply too late to claw back government power once a bureaucracy like this entrenches itself. His answer was blunt. He pointed to the Reagan administration as the only period he could recall when the Federal Register actually shrank, meaning the accumulation of regulation and bureaucratic bloat can, in fact, be reversed. Reagan’s own line, as Sowell recounted it, was that these problems are “not complicated. It’s just not easy to do.” (8:52)
That distinction matters. Fixing this isn’t a mystery requiring another task force or blue ribbon commission. Sowell mocked that exact impulse, comparing modern committees formed to study why housing is unaffordable to forming a committee to investigate why the ground gets wet after it rains. The answer is obvious to anyone willing to look. Restrict the ability to fire bad teachers, and you guarantee bad teachers stay employed. Restrict the ability to build housing while population grows, and you guarantee a housing shortage. Basic economics, ignored on purpose. (9:16)
Who Actually Pays the Price
The people hurt worst by this arrangement are not the bureaucrats or the union representatives negotiating these protections. They are the kids sitting in classrooms led by teachers everyone already agrees should not be there. Sowell was direct about who bears the cost of a system built to protect adults instead of educate children, describing an education establishment that has graduated generations of students who are, in his words, semi-literate, while the adults responsible face no real consequences. (8:33)
Parents have been fighting this fight for over a century, often with far fewer resources and far less institutional support than they have today. Sowell pointed out that black families in particular were sending their kids to private and parochial schools decades before school choice became a mainstream policy debate, simply because they understood what public schools were failing to deliver. That history gets erased every time someone claims school choice is a new or radical idea. It is neither. It is a return to what parents have always wanted: control over their own kids’ education instead of a monopoly run by people who face zero accountability for failure.
The rubber room isn’t a glitch in the system. It is the system, functioning precisely as the people who built it intended, protecting failure at the direct expense of the children it was supposed to serve.
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