Public-employee unions hit

The New York Post: 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, signaled a willingness to at least discuss repealing LIFO when it comes to teacher layoffs, in favor of “an objective standard to measure people.”

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, 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.