Education reform advocates have complained for years about how difficult it is for the city’s public schools to fire an underperforming teacher. We once devoted nearly the entire front page of the Sun to a flowchart of the steps necessary to dismiss a teacher, a process that can take more than 100 hours of administrative time and can drag on for months. So it’s nothing less than nuts that the City Council is scheduled to vote as early as next week on a law that would make it even harder to fire bad teachers.

The law, intro 83-A, is sponsored by Council Members Gioia, Gentile, Martinez, Weprin, Arroyo, Katz, James, Gonzalez, and Gerson. The real force behind it, however, is the teachers’ union, which is trying to get back via the City Council whatever marginal victories Mayor Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein, won in the last contract negotiation. The law bills itself as a whistleblower protection effort, but what it amounts to is a plan to protect failing employees, a safe harbor for misbehaving or incompetent employees being paid with the taxpayers’ money.

As originally drafted, the law would have made it illegal to fire, for any reason, any city employee who had ever criticized Mr. Klein. As revised, the law states, “No officer or employee of an agency of the city shall take an adverse personnel action with respect to another officer or employee in retaliation for his or her making a report of information concerning conduct which he or she knows or reasonably believes to present a substantial and specific risk of harm to the health, safety or educational welfare of a child by another city officer or employee, which concerns his or her office or employment, or by persons dealing with the city, which concerns their dealings with the city, (i) to the commissioner, (ii) to a council member, the public advocate, the comptroller or the mayor, or (iii) to any superior officer.”

This is a recipe for litigation. Any teacher who quibbles to his department chairman or assistant principal in a disagreement with, say, a textbook choice or a personnel policy can easily define that as reporting a concern about “the educational welfare of a child.” Any attempt at a subsequent disciplinary action against that teacher is likely to then be turned into a lengthy inquest into whether there were retaliatory motives. The likely outcome is that supervisors won’t bother and that malcontents will join other protected classes in the ranks of underperforming teachers shuffled from one failing school to another or waiting in a “rubber room” for an assignment while drawing a hefty city paycheck.

Genuine whistleblowers — as opposed to mere whiners — already have substantial protections under section 75B of the New York State Civil Service Law; under the City Administrative Code, which protects those who report corrupt or criminal behavior to the city comptroller or to the department of investigation, and under policies still on the books from the old Board of Education, which protect those who report corruption to the special investigator who focuses on the schools. The only reason for another law is to guarantee complainers jobs for life, creating yet another obstacle to getting rid of bad teachers, which is already difficult.

If the teachers or the unions who represent other employees who would be covered by the law — any public employee dealing with children — want to win these sorts of protections at the collective bargaining table, that would be one thing. At least the administration then is in a position to seek concessions in return, such as merit pay or a longer school day or school year. And at least the current mayor and his schools commissioner, unlike the city council members, aren’t accepting campaign contributions from the public employee unions. If the whistle needs to be blown on anyone here for endangering the welfare of children, it is the lawmakers.