NEW YORK – New York City school leaders have filed a labor complaint against the city’s teachers union for refusing to negotiate the terms of a new teacher evaluation system.

The union’s bullheadedness may force the city to miss the state-imposed January deadline for implementing the new evaluation system, which would lead to the forfeiture of $250 million in school funding.

Without that money, school officials may have to eliminate “professional development opportunities for staff and after-school programs for students, such as music, sports and art,” reports DNAInfo.com.

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City leaders claim that United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew is refusing to agree to new teacher evaluations until the city promises “to limit school closures, reduce paperwork for teachers, and award ‘economic credit’ toward a future contract,” reports GothamSchools.org.

“Under state law, those issues do not have to be discussed in order to devise a new evaluation system,” the news site notes.

We’ll be even more blunt: Those issues are simply excuses employed by the UFT to run out the clock.

Why is the UFT willing to let the city school system lose a huge pile of much-needed money when the new teacher evaluation system – which makes use of student test scores – is already a matter of state law?

It’s simple: Mulgrew doesn’t want to implement the evaluation system until New York City has a new, union-friendly mayor who will smooth some of the sharp edges from the new rating process.

While the next mayor won’t be able to change the 40 percent of the evaluation that links a teacher’s performance to student test scores, he or she will be able to make the remaining 60 percent of the evaluation – which centers around classroom observations – as soft and non-threatening as possible.

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Earlier this month, GothamSchools.org reported that a large number of New York City teachers were furious at school administrators for making unannounced classroom observations, issuing unreasonable demands, and leaving them with “scathing feedback” over small transgressions.

UFT Secretary Michael Mendel called the surprise observations “a disaster” and said they were creating “a terrible atmosphere” in the city’s schools.

If union leaders stonewall the new evaluation system long enough, they’ll be able to kill off the practice of unannounced classroom visits by administrators. That will give teachers plenty of advanced notice, and will allow them to put on a nice show for their bosses. And it will have the effect of making classroom observations – 60 percent of the new evaluations – a meaningless exercise.

The New York media has been focusing on the money that New York City schools will lose out on without an evaluation system in place. And that is a big deal. Current Mayor Michael Bloomberg said recently that the teacher union’s behavior “is going to cost us a lot of money.”

That’s true enough. But in the long run, the union’s selfish games are going to cost New Yorkers a lot more than just money.  They will cost the city a chance to identify excellent, so-so and poor teachers, and take steps to make sure there’s a great instructor in every classroom.

Mulgrew and his union should be ashamed of themselves, and collective bargaining should be removed from public schools altogether.