Corruption

A scandalous 'success'

Bronx high school principal Lynn Passarella has discovered the secret to aca demic success: Never flunk your students, no matter what.

It looks bad on your record.

And then there's the money.

The formula has paid tremendous dividends for Passarella herself.

Her Theatre Arts Production Company School (TAPCo) is the city's highest-rated school -- an achievement that last year put $7,000 in performance bonuses right into the principal's pocket (and generated $3,500 spiffs for each of her assistant principals).

Whether her students are prospering academically because of the no-flunk doctrine is another matter.

As is the issue of whether the Department of Education is accomplishing anything with its dubious letter-grade report cards for public schools.

Basically, the Passarella plan is this: Any student who regularly attends classes is guaranteed passing grades. (And few chronic truants are failed, either.)

Yet not until a whistleblower called attention to the policy were DOE officials apparently aware of it -- and how it helped TAPCo score a city-best numerical score of 106.3 on the annual evaluations, as The Post's Jennifer Bain and

Yoav Gonen reported.

In fact, not even regular attendance was necessary -- students who were regularly absent still got passing grades. Others received credit for courses that the school doesn't even offer.

DOE is investigating, though where that will end up is anybody's guesss.

Not surprisingly, the UFT is jumping all over this to trash the notion of evaluating schools based on student performance.

Bad mistake -- but typical.

We've called on DOE to do away with its letter-grade evaluation system, in which schools are graded on a Rube-Goldberg-like curve -- with quotas for top and bottom letter grades.

All that produces is a distorted picture of actual school performance.

But one of the key reforms instituted by former Chancellor Joel Klein was endowing principals with maximum flexibility in return for stricter accountability.

That Passarella ridiculously abused the flexibility means only that she needs to be held to account -- not that the reform should be scrapped. Nor that student performance isn't a legitimate metric.

Passarella must be dispatched to whatever rubber room they've set aside for egregiously bad principals.

The sooner, the better.