Today’s Star-Ledger features a piece on the infamous “rubber room” in New York City that warehouses 700 fully-paid teachers who have been accused of everything from insubordination to sexual misconduct. They sit in an unfurnished room painting portraits, doing crossword puzzles, chatting, entitled to full pay and benefits. Reports the Ledger,

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.

City officials said that they make teachers report to a rubber room instead of sending they home because the union contract requires that they be allowed to continue in their jobs in some fashion while their cases are being heard. The contract does not permit them to be given other work.

Compare this description to a New York Times article back in October, 2007 entitled “Where Teachers Sit, Awaiting Their Fates.” Writer Samuel G. Freedman depicts an intrepid young man who boarded a ship in Stockholm, “the final leg in a complex and risky process of escaping to the West from his native Bulgaria. Newly free, he believed that he had left totalitarianism forever behind.” Alas, his hopes were dashed: this artist, “whose etchings were exhibited in the National Gallery,” experienced “a certain sense of gulag déjà vu” when he was ordered to report to the rubber room, “ a place of “stale, spartan conditions and the absense of any physical or intellectual stimulation” that provides “a ceaseless reminder that in some respects they are guilty until proven innocent.”

“There is a spirit of the K.G.B. about it,” Mr. Valtchev [the Bulgarian art teacher] said. “Their main strategy is to destabilize the person, reduce his self-respect.”

So, who are the victims and villains here? According to the Times two years ago, the victims are the NYC teachers union members, betrayed by the system, unethically imprisoned in quarters straight out of a Solzhenitsyn novel; the villain is the New York City Board of Education, practically Gestapo-like in their infringement on freedom and tenure. According the Ledger today, however, the victims of the rubber room are the taxpayers and the villain is the leadership of the teachers union, cleverly cloaking contracts with untenable protection for the worst offenders.

Who’s right? Who knows? That’s not the point. The radical shift in the media’s description of NYC’s tenure laws – from necessary and valiant protectors of the oppressed, to craven and opportunistic loopholes –speaks volumes about public perception of teacher unions.