An education system designed to protect the teachers

Teachers’ latest free ride

By MICHAEL GOODWIN

From Timothy Cardinal Dolan to Jeremy Lin to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, New York is on a roll. Everywhere you turn, incredible people are doing amazing things. Then there are the teachers unions.

To cut through the complexities of the deals the unions made with Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Cuomo, consider this: Under the terms, no public-school teacher in New York state can be fired for incompetence until June — of 2014!

And that’s if everything goes according to plan. Take that, taxpayers and parents.

Whatever the merits, and there are some, including more federal money, a big negative is that the new system will erase current attempts to hold teachers accountable for student performance. “It wipes the slate clean,” one city official said.

That means thousands of city teachers already found to be boobs in the classroom likely will get a fresh start. Under the new law, they must get “ineffective” ratings for two consecutive years before administrators can even try to dismiss them.

With details still to be worked out in the city and other local districts, the earliest the new system could take effect is the start of school next September. The time needed for someone to get two years of “ineffective” evaluations would push the calendar to June 2014, which is when the first group of failing teachers would face possible termination.

But dismissal won’t be a sure thing. Under the terms the city negotiated, two ineffective ratings will be considered a presumption of incompetence and shift the burden of proof to the teacher. However, the final decision on firing remains with a three-person panel, which includes an independent arbitrator and one representative each from the union and City Hall.

No wonder Bloomberg complained that he will leave office in December 2013 without dismissing a single bad teacher under the agreement. Cuomo probably won’t see much impact when his term ends a year later.

Equally troubling, the city does not get new powers to fire thousands of teachers it already deems unfit. Last year, the Mayor’s Office counted more than 7,000 in various categories it wanted to dismiss.

Some had committed crimes, and some were chronically absent or late. But the vast majority were on the hit list because of poor classroom performance. Typically, only a relative handful of teachers are fired each year, because the cumbersome process is designed to protect them, so most on the list will get a clean slate.

In addition to 2,671 teachers with at least one unsatisfactory rating who were not fired, they included 1,149 employees who had been pushed out of a permanent job but were still being paid and 1,593 teachers in grades 4 to 8 who had failed to help students improve over two or more years.

The cost to taxpayers of paying for dead wood is staggering. The widely used figure of more than $100,000 for each employee per year, which includes salary and benefits, means the city is paying $70 million for little or no good service.

The upshot, then, is that Chancellor Dennis Walcott must make better use of every lever of authority he has already. The first, best way is through denying tenure.

It’s a power the city held all along, but educrats rubber-stamped these “jobs for life” at a rate of 99 percent. Two years ago, the mayor finally ordered a standards-driven process, and last year only 57 percent of those eligible got tenure.

As many as 2,400 teachers are eligible this year. If only the best pass muster, the others will resign or try again the following year. Either way, if high standards are consistently enforced over years, the city eventually will have a big impact on teacher quality. By then it also will be able to move against thousands of others who presumably will get two years of ineffective ratings under the new system.

Good enough for New York? Not really. But it is what it is.