Schools’ bitter fruit

It’s called the “Dance of the Lemons,” and there’s nothing sweet about it. It’s the sour taste left by bad teachers who shuffle from school to school, inflicting their damage on yet another group of innocent students.

Ending that destructive dance is the aim of Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Cuomo, who want to create a better teacher-evaluation system. To succeed, they’ll need to stay united against the powerful teachers unions.

They’ll also need to develop a tougher plan for moving bad teachers out of the profession altogether. Otherwise, they won’t end the game of musical chairs.

As it stands, their reform proposals fail that test.

Some 15 years ago, Chancellor Rudy Crew coined the term “Dance of the Lemons” after discovering how hard it was to fire bad teachers. Principals told him that instead of giving incompetent teachers an “unsatisfactory” rating, they would make a deal.

If the teachers agreed to leave their schools, principals would give them a “satisfactory” rating. The teachers could then land jobs at other schools without blemish under the pass-fail system.

That system still exists. On average, only about 2 percent of teachers, or 1,500, get rated unsatisfactory each year, even as about 50 percent of students perform below grade level. As Bloomberg told me last year, “You’ve got to be really bad to get a ‘U’ rating.”

Yet the changes that would come from the proposed reforms might improve things only marginally. Under the plans, the final decision about whether to fire a bad teacher would remain in the hands of an independent arbitrator. That’s a mistake.

That process is so clunky that the city is able to fire a mere fraction of the “U”-rated teachers. Most become substitutes, getting paid a full salary for working occasionally, while others do no work at all. Taxpayers have shelled out hundreds of millions of dollars to keep those unwanted teachers on the payroll.

A 2010 state law on evaluations was supposed to help, but it is being challenged in court by unions. It would create four rating categories instead of two. Teachers would be rated highly effective, effective, developing or ineffective.

The union challenge is over how much of the evaluation would be based on student test scores. The state says 40 percent; the union says 20 percent.

In the city there is an added dispute over the appeals process for those rated ineffective. The union wants an arbitrator to make the final rating decision, while the city offered to let a panel make a nonbinding recommendation with, the chancellor having the final say.