Judicial Madness on Tenure

It’s already insanely difficult to get rid of incompetent (and even dangerous) publicschool teachers in New York City. Now a judge has made it even harder.

And he may have opened the door to reinstating already-fired bad teachers.

Staten Island Supreme Court Justice Desmond Green last week ordered the Department of Education to rehire (with back pay) special-ed teacher Rosalie Cardinale, who’d received poor evaluations over four years.

But Green wasn’t interested in her job performance: He ruled that DOE did an end-run around the law by moving to fire Cardinale without a formal vote of the 13-member Panel for Educational Policy. That, he said, “violates New York’s strong public policy protecting the integrity of the tenure system.”

This is just nuts: Existing rules allow principals and school superintendents to make findings of probable cause to fire a teacher; routing all cases through the PEP would be impossible.

The judge called tenure the only way to protect “competent teachers from the abuses they might be subjected to if they could be dismissed at the whim of their supervisors.”

Reality check: The system far more often protects teachers who have no business in the classroom. Fully 97 percent of city public-school teachers are rated “satisfactory” even as half of all students leave school unready for either college or a career.

And DOE maintains that Cardinale “performed incompetently” in her last four years “despite attempts by school administrators to help her improve.”

The city says numerous court rulings have upheld DOE’s termination process and the Law Department plans to appeal.

Good: City schoolkids already suffer enough from those who keep failing them.