If I may respond to Mr. Ted Frank’s comment above:
Quote:
“Even if Rosenfeld is entirely innocent and unjustly placed in the rubber room, it’s certainly problematic if he is using his time there to run outside businesses.”

I spent an entire year sharing a table with Mr. Rosenfeld in the Brooklyn, Chapel Street Rubber Room. While many of the Teachers just read the newspaper of try to make the long day go by faster by playing cards or dominos or engaging in discussions, each Teacher has to get through the day as best he or she can.

Teachers in a school are free to make calls between class assignments and on their breaks or at lunch time. Having sat with Mr. Rosenfeld on a daily basis for an entire year I can vouch for the fact that he used his cell phone no more than any teacher still at a school would do.

What logic or sense would it make to prohibit this man from using his cell phone any way he chose. He did ask to be incarcerated for an insane decade or be given the “Life Sentence” meted out to him by a vengeful Chancellor who was/is in need of a Scapegoat to deflect the Public’s attention away from the massive failures of that same Chancellor.

History is quite replete with Dictators selecting from the population, Scapegoats to manipulate the Public’s anger.

I might add that during the year I sat next to this falsely alleged “dangerous” individual, I began writing down my experiences as a Whistle-blower under the present Regime, If this book/memoir/expose of rampant corruption and waste of Tax payer dollars is eventually published (which is a good possibility) will the NY POST vilify and crucify me also with the 42 Point Type Headline:

“Former Teacher of the Year used his time in the Rubber Room to write Best Seller / Expose/ Personal Memoir”.

Will I be referred to as a degenerate human being because my time spent in the Rubber Room later translated into huge Royalties ?

Will I be required to surrender the Movie Rights and attendant profits to NYC or perhaps the Chancellor will claim a percentage since it was he who forced me to spend years in 4 (four) different Rubber Room gulags all over NYC.

It is perfectly possible that the way I used my years in the Rubber Room will garner far more wealth than Mr Rosenfeld’s so-called Real Estate “Empire”. Imagine- now the POST would have its readers believe a few millions acquired over 30 years constitutes an Empire.

I live just down the block from Mayor Bloomberg’s forty million dollar Limestone Mansion at 17 East 79th Street near Fifth Ave. To my knowledge if that were the Mayor’s sole real estate holding, I very much doubt anyone would accuse the Mayor of possessing or controlling a “Real Estate Empire”. And that Mansion is worth six times what my friend Alan Rosenfeld possesses, all of which houses in Queens may all carry huge Mortgages still to pay off.

I very much appreciate being allowed to comment here and would certainly be interested in any and all reactions to what I have just stated above.

Thanks in advance to those who wish to respond.

Certainly a Union has a duty to defend its members from injustices.

In any event, it’s Rosenfeld’s fellow unionized teachers who perhaps have the most to complain about: if the union is insisting that the city spend $10M a year on teachers who the city wishes to fire, that’s $10M in salary that the union could have extracted that isn’t going to working teachers, because the union’s negotiators thought it more important to provide protections against being fired than to ensure that teachers maximize their wages.

Even if Rosenfeld is entirely innocent and unjustly placed in the rubber room, it’s certainly problematic if he is using his time there to run outside businesses.