A Harlem charter school shredded a boatload of taxpayer money this year by booting 33 substandard staffers and handing them substantial severance packages.
Not to worry — it was a good thing.
As The Post’s Yoav Gonen reported yesterday, Harlem’s Promise Academy I — a public school operating free of union-contract constraints — gave severance pay to 15 teachers and 18 other staffers as it fired them because of poor performance.
That was the humane thing to do — and, happily, it will help to keep the school’s long-term personnel costs down.
But while it may seem that Promise Academy was rewarding teachers for failing, severance pay is a sensible arrangement used in almost every industry.
Now consider what happens when substandard teachers are identified in the city’s mainstream public schools.
Nothing happens, that’s what.
Severance pay isn’t offered in the traditional schools. Then again, nobody ever gets fired. Unionized teachers have such strong job protections that it’s virtually impossible to let any of them go.
So instead of a one-time farewell check, terrible teachers get comfortable salaries and lush pensions. Worst of all, kids who reasonably expect to have competent teachers get something far less.
So Promise Academy I managed to save itself a heap of trouble and a bundle of money by offering severance checks.
Charter schools are good at math.
Traditional public schools, not so much.
So how does that play out?
Promise Academy I’s high school is a sterling success: It has a 98.7 percent graduation rate (against 61 percent citywide) and a 46 percent college-readiness rate (against 29 percent citywide).
Still, its elementary school hasn’t kept up the pace — and that wasn’t good enough.
Promise Academy I is a “no excuses” charter — meaning it holds students to the very highest standards of conduct and performance. How refreshing that it expects just as much from its teachers, including those 15 who got the axe.
If only all public schools in New York were that serious about successful schooling and the wages of failure.