Opinion

NYC makes tainted James Brown high school principal

City Hall often complains — rightly — that it’s hard to get rid of the bad apples in the city’s schools. All the more reason to wonder why it hired acting Flushing HS principal James Brown in the first place.

As The Post reported last Sunday, Brown seems to have racked up a dubious record while serving as principal of Long Island’s Baldwin Middle School. A lawsuit there accused him of sexual harassment, intimidation and making lewd and racist comments. The district had to agree to pay $1.6 million to settle the case.

All the same, New York City’s Department of Education hired Brown to serve as Flushing’s “interim acting principal,” with the possibility of getting the job for good.

He’s the best the department can find?

Education officials now claim they didn’t know what they were getting. The lawsuit, an aide says, didn’t show up in an initial background check, and Baldwin officials had only good things to say about Brown.

Excuses, excuses.

Of course officials had only good things to say; negative reviews might have invited more litigation — and hurt their own chances of dumping Brown on the city (a move known in the business as “passing the lemon”). Meanwhile, teachers at Flushing managed to unearth Brown’s unsavory past by using an exotic tool called . . . Google.

The city needs to fix this problem before it gets worse: A department aide says her agency is “doing additional reference and background checks, and those are all taken into consideration” before any decision to make the job permanent.

And Flushing, by the way, already has enough problems: It’s one of 24 schools the city tried to close and reopen with new staff last year but was blocked by a suit filed by the teachers and principals unions.

Maybe hiring Brown was City Hall’s revenge for that. Maybe it was meant to buttress the city’s case for closing the place, should he prove a disaster. Or maybe it was just sloppiness. Whatever the explanation, it’s inexcusable.

“Part of the reason we sued Brown was to get him out of education, because we didn’t think he deserved to be around children,” says Harold Newman, who brought the suit against Baldwin along with his wife, Cheryl Farb, a former dean of students there.

Brown’s record clearly makes him unfit for the job in Flushing. In an era when any 14-year-old with an Internet connection could have discovered that record in 10 minutes, why can’t our Education Department do the same?