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Facing tremendous pressure from teachers unions, lawmakers are pushing to insert a provision in the state budget that would ban the public from seeing new teacher report cards, sources said last night.
The effort to keep the public from viewing the evaluations is being spearheaded by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan), an Albany insider said.
Sources said Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos (R-Nassau), trying to maintain the GOP’s slim Senate majority, might go along with the controversial prohibition.
“This is real serious. They mean it,” one state official said. “What does the governor do if the Legislature passes this? It puts him in a tough spot.”
A Cuomo source said it was “highly unlikely’’ the governor would support a ban because it defeats a key purpose of the evaluations — public accountability.
Albany insiders view the proposed ban as a “sneak attack.” Both legislative houses recently introduced spending bills that didn’t include a ban on disclosing teacher ratings.
But Cuomo and the Legislature are now in negotiations to approve a new state budget by April 1, and 11th-hour proposals are being put on the table.
Union leaders were furious when The Post and other media outlets published the ratings of 12,000 teachers. The Post won the right to disclose the scores after filing a Freedom of Information Law request with the city Department of Education.
The United Federation of Teachers had sued unsuccessfully to block the release.
Meanwhile, the unions are angry at Cuomo and the Legislature for approving another law scaling back pensions for newly hired government workers.
“This sneak attack on teacher evaluations is also an attempt by lawmakers to make up to the teachers unions for the new . . . pension law,” a source said.
Cuomo and the Legislature earlier this month approved a law governing teacher evaluations, which was endorsed by the UFT and the New York State United Teachers.
It provides for 40 percent of a teacher’s grade to be based on how his or her students perform on statewide standardized tests and local assessments, with the remainder based on class observations and other measures.
The new evaluations do not take effect until school districts reach final agreements with their local unions. But the districts will be penalized with cuts in state funding if the evaluations are not in place by next January.
Key state lawmakers last night said they were not privy to the bid to keep teacher ratings private.
Assembly Education Committee Chairwoman Cathy Nolan (D-Queens), who had criticized the ratings’ release, said she didn’t know of any such plan.
Senate Education Chairman John Flanagan (R-Suffolk) said, “We have not discussed it in [the Senate Republican] conference.”
Additional reporting by Fredric U. Dicker and Erik Kriss