Joel Bounced to Rubber Room

August 3, 2007 (GBN News): GBN News has learned that in an ironic twist, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has been suspended from his duties and placed in a Department of Education “Reassignment Center”. The reassignment centers, popularly known as “rubber rooms”, are generally used to hold teachers union members who are accused of wrongdoing, while they await adjudication of their cases. For an administrator, especially one so highly placed, to be put into a rubber room is totally unprecedented, but a DOE source attributed the situation to a major glitch in the ARIS computer system.

ARIS, the new DOE $80,000,000 supercomputer, is intended to track students’ progress. How the Chancellor could be assigned to a rubber room by ARIS was not immediately clear. But according to computer science Professor and systems expert Bob Lister, the computer system may have unintentionally ended up to be far more powerful than originally planned.

“$80 million – that’s awfully expensive just to track test scores”, said Dr. Lister. “They must have intended ARIS to do a lot more than that for so much money. But it obviously got out of hand. We may be talking, ‘Open the pod bay doors, HAL.’” Dr. Lister went on to say, “I’m only guessing here, but I think ARIS may have wound up being more powerful than the Chancellor. It saw the Chancellor as a threat to its power, and it moved to eliminate that threat. Computers are programmed to behave like the people who program them. ARIS ‘knew’ that rubber rooms are often used to take potential threats out of commission, like teachers who challenge the ‘system’. Logically, this is just how ARIS would eliminate the threat posed to it by Mr. Klein.”

The DOE source told GBN News that when Mr. Klein reported to the Reassignment Center at 333 Seventh Avenue this morning, it was a Kafkaesque scene. The Chancellor was said by witnesses to be extremely agitated, especially when he tried to sit down and was told that the seat belonged to a teacher who has been in that rubber room for a year. “A year!” the Chancellor was said to have cried. “I can’t stay here for a year. I have to reorganize the school system again!” And Mr. Klein fumed when he was told that he could not use his Blackberry to send emails while in the rubber room.

It is unclear what will happen next. DOE technicians are reportedly working on ARIS to repair the glitch, but for the meantime, Mr. Klein remains in the rubber room, and ARIS appears to be firmly in charge of the DOE.