The UFT on Dec. 18 blasted a letter from the Cuomo administration to state Education Commissioner John King that intimated that the governor was going to use the power he has in the budgetary process to try to ram through changes to education policy that charter school advocates and corporate education reform groups have been pushing for years.

“This letter comes right out of the playbook of the hedge-funders for whom education ‘reform’ has become a pet cause and who poured money into the Cuomo re-election campaign,” said UFT President Michael Mulgrew. “The governor owes these people big time, but unfortunately the children of New York will end up paying his debts.”

Without revealing his precise policy proposals, Cuomo’s top aide signaled in the letter that the governor would seek to eliminate or curtail tenure, introduce merit pay, get rid of the charter school cap, overhaul the mayoral control law, get tough on struggling schools, and give the governor more control over appointments to the state Board of Regents.

The governor also took aim at the state’s teacher evaluation system in the letter even as New York City’s first year under the new system showed a process that appeared to be producing fair and reliable ratings.

Of the 61,184 New York City teachers covered by the new evaluation system, according to State Education Department data released on Dec. 16, 9.2 percent of teachers were rated Highly Effective, 82.5 percent were rated Effective, 7.0 percent were rated Developing and 1.2 percent were rated Ineffective.

“These results show that the previous mayor did not get the ‘gotcha’ system he wanted,” said Mulgrew. “We now have a strong foundation for an evaluation system which — if we properly implement it and if we use the new voice we gained in our contract — can help teachers improve throughout their careers.”

Some 6,000 New York City teachers received individualized Teacher Improvement Plans this fall targeted at helping them address their weaknesses.

In the letter, the Cuomo administration indicated that it would seek changes to the teacher evaluation system to increase the number of teachers rated Ineffective and terminated. Among the measures floated in the letter were increasing the weight of measures of student learning, standardizing how the observation portion is scored and making it easier to terminate low-performing teachers.

Mulgrew said it was foolhardy to revamp the new evaluation system so soon after it was established.

“If you keep making major changes, you are never going to get positive results because there will always be disruptions in the system,” he said.

Mulgrew said that Cuomo and his hedge-fund allies were ignoring all the things that would actually help improve public education, starting with proper funding.

“The ‘Hunger Games’ approach of the governor’s hedge-fund pals specifically does not address the real issues of our schools and children — especially the huge disparities in local school funding and the $6 billion the state owes for the Campaign for Fiscal Equity and which the governor has shown no interest in funding,” he said. “This failure translates into oversize classes, lack of supplies, along with shortages of librarians and guidance counselors, arts and music and all the other supports for teachers and students that would help our schools succeed.”