Opinion

The speaker’s open door

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The first cracks are appearing in a hitherto impregnable wall built by public-employee unions — especially the teachers — regarding layoffs:

Namely, last in, first out — and never mind merit.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a longtime labor lackey, yesterday signaled a willingness to at least dis cuss repealing LIFO when it comes to teacher layoffs, in favor of “an objective standard to measure people.”

“That would be an interesting way to go,” he said — stressing that “right now, there are no established standards.”

True enough, more’s the pity.

And a spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg — who seeks Gov. Cuomo’s backing for repeal of LIFO — adds that no such criteria are currently being drawn up.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to rid the school system of bad teachers, regardless of seniority.

As Post State Editor Fredric U. Dicker reported yesterday, a compromise may be in the works that would allow the Department of Education to slough off up to 4,000 “non-teaching teachers.”

Those would be members of the “absent teacher reserve pool” — idle teachers from schools that have been shut down for poor performance.

It could also mean teachers who aren’t in the classroom because they’ve received an “unsatisfactory” rating or those who have been chronically absent for reasons unrelated to illness.

Eventually, though, full-time teachers will have to be laid off.

And while guidelines and parameters to evaluate teachers are important, they can’t be the sole deciding factor — principals, newly empowered under mayoral control, must be given discretion.

Sure, that’s an open invitation to legal entanglements: Any laid-off teacher is going to claim he’s a victim of subjective or biased judgment.

But with education funds becoming increasingly scarce, they must be used in a way that ensures the maximum benefit. And that means keeping the best teachers in the system, regardless of seniority.

Just how far Silver and the union-friendly Assembly are willing to go on this remains to be seen.

But LIFO needs to go — the sooner, the better.