Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan says it was a hip injury that kept her from creating a commission to study much-needed — and union-resisted — teacher-tenure reform.
Well, if that’s true, then Randi Weingarten must have suddenly gotten quite violent with the politicians she keeps in her pocket.
Because this scheme has the United Federation of Teachers chief’s fingerprints all over it.
As The Post has reported, the tenure-reform commission was agreed to last year as a compromise measure after teachers unions killed a bill that would have allowed school districts to weigh student test scores in tenure decisions.
But Nolan, chair of the Assembly Education Committee, never introduced it.
“I was out with my hip replacement,” she said Tuesday. “I feel so bad to say that — I’m not trying to cop out.”
That’s unlikely: Nolan’s Web site notes 77 other education bills she was able to pass last year while she was out for surgery, The Post reported yesterday.
Far more plausibly, Weingarten — who hardly broke a sweat deep-sixing the imminent threat to her members’ tenure protections — simply yanked her puppet strings once more to have Nolan quietly kill the commission.
And Nolan’s really a puppet twice-removed.
Nothing happens (or doesn’t happen) in the Assembly without the express approval of Speaker Sheldon Silver — and Shelly’s been taking marching orders on schools from Weingarten & Co. for years.
To be sure, we never thought much of the commission in the first place. Such panels are a dime a dozen in Albany, to be stacked — or ignored — at will.
But clearly Weingarten and Silver didn’t want anyone even talking about tenure reform. And so it was.