Enough to make you gag

T

here’s an idea floating around the state capital that calls for enacting legislation to prohibit parents from discussing the quality of their children’s teachers in public.

The concept is so outrageously incredible that it bears repeating: The Legislature would gag mothers and fathers to prevent public dissemination of teacher performance ratings.

Here, Mr. and Mrs. Jones, you are entitled to know how Johnny’s teacher scored in the new evaluation system, but you will face the full brunt of the law if you give anyone the information.

Now, no one in the Legislature will own up to being the author of a notion well-suited for the National People’s Congress of Beijing.

And Gov. Cuomo, no, no, no, it certainly didn’t originate with him. But it has lived and breathed nonetheless.

Quoth the august newspaper of record: “Supporters and opponents of public access note several complicating factors, including the question of whether parents could be prevented from publicizing the evaluations of their children’s teachers in a newspaper or on a blog, for instance.”

Go ahead, we dare lawmakers. They’d be pilloried in court if they managed to escape being burned at the stake.

More than anything, the secret power-playing shows how potent a force the teachers unions are in Albany — so powerful that they’ve buffaloed the Legislature into considering the possibility of trampling the First Amendment rights of millions of New Yorkers for the purpose of protecting their members from public scrutiny.

Cuomo and the Legislature this year approved a landmark bill aimed at rating teachers by how much learning they impart.

The courts have ruled those ratings are available to the public under the Freedom of Information Law, as happened when the city Education Department was ordered to release the ratings of thousands of teachers that had been prepared under a pilot program.

The teachers hated seeing their names listed, but parents loved it. They also proved more than capable of grasping the subtleties.

The new evaluation system is not experimental. It was drawn up in a detailed process, and the methodologies are being negotiated with the unions. So there should be no hesitation about opening the full records to everyone.

Yet some, including Cuomo, seem inclined to limit the public release of the data.

Their first idea was to give the information only to parents, but the unions got worried that parents would turn around and make all known.

Interested members of the public then raised the point that people who didn’t have kids in a particular school would want to know about the quality of the staff before enrolling or moving into a neighborhood. That led to the possibility of releasing general, facultywide information. Stop the nonsense. Cuomo needs to lead Albany to the understanding that teacher performance ratings are of high public interest and must stay public.