Mulgrew’s sex ed

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott invited United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew to join in seeking a state law that would speed from the classroom teachers who engage in inappropriate conduct with students. Fat chance. Although Walcott would fully preserve due process rights, Mulgrew stuck firmly to a status quo that, in effect, keeps teachers on the job unless proven to have engaged in sex acts. And sometimes, not even that is enough to get them fired.

Employment arbitrators, who depend on the unions for work, let slide conduct like inappropriate hugging, tickling, rubbing, lap-sitting, suggestive remarks and flirtatious communications by declaring that the behavior falls short of sexual misconduct, the definition of a firing offense.

As but one example, the special schools investigator found in 2000 that computer teacher Wilbert Cortez had inappropriately touched two boys. Cortez’s punishment was limited to a transfer and a letter in his file.

In February, he was charged with sexually abusing two boys at Public School 174 in Queens. On Thursday, he was accused of groping three more boys, ages 6, 8 and 10, between 2007 and 2011.

Then there’s the case of James Madison High School English teacher Erin Sayar, arraigned Friday on a charge of carrying on a sexual affair with an 11th-grader.

And the case of Thomas Gibbons, a special-education teacher arrested Wednesday on charges of having molested a 9-year-old female relative. Gibbons was transferred from William Taft High School in the Bronx to John F. Kennedy HS after a brush with the arbitration system in the mid-1990s.

A school system with 75,000 teachers is going to produce its share of sexual victimization and misconduct. Mulgrew is doing no one any favors — not the students, and not the vast majority of upstanding teachers — by refusing to yield in the slightest on contract rights that protect the unfit and the dangerous.