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POL HAS BONE TO PICK

When it comes to excuses, this pol shoots from the hip.

It was a busted pelvis, not orders from her teachers-union benefactors, that caused Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan to block an effort at studying tenure reform, she claimed yesterday.

“I was out with my hip replacement,” Nolan said. “I feel so bad to say that — I’m not trying to cop out.”

The Queens Democrat, a protégé of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, chairs the Assembly Education Committee. She made her comments as high-powered New York State United Teachers lobbyists left her office after a closed-door meeting.

“I’m nobody’s puppet,” Nolan said, asserting her independence, after NYSUT lobbyist Jacqueline Paredes and an aide departed. “Some people met with my staff. It’s not a crime.”

Her counsel, Devrah Nusbaum, met with Paredes, who also kept on eye on a separate Senate education hearing yesterday, to discuss special education, Nolan said.

Nolan added that she also met with Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum to discuss mayoral control of schools.

Last year, Nolan let die on her desk a bill that would have created a commission to study how standardized test results could be factored into teacher evaluations.

The Legislature and Gov. Paterson agreed to form the commission after the United Federation of Teachers and NYSUT crushed an attempt by school administrators to include test results in tenure criteria.

It was a compromise that was supposed to keep the standardized-test issue alive.

And in an uncommon show of unity, the Senate, then controlled by Republican Majority Leader Joe Bruno, voted 62-0 in June to create the commission.

“NYSUT hated that idea and pressured the speaker to ignore it,” said one Albany insider briefed on the discussions.

Although Nolan, who since 2001 has collected $12,575 in campaign contributions from the teachers unions, allowed the commission to die, she now says she’ll reconsider it.

“When they jump-start a commission or make it part of the mayoral-control discussion, it will be discussed again,” she said. “It doesn’t mean the issue is dead. Nothing ever dies in Albany.”

UFT President Randi Weingarten, however, also now says she actually wanted a public study of standardized tests.

“I wanted the commission to be done and was disappointed they didn’t do the commission,” Weingarten told The Post for yesterday’s editions.

brendan.scott@nypost.com