Exclusive | Brooklyn teacher NYC tried to fire decade ago for fixing grades is back in classroom and under fraud probe again: No accountability

The city Department of Education is once again investigating a bad teacher for fixing grades — more than a decade after trying to fire him for falsifying Regents test scores, The Post has learned.Critics say it’s a case study in what is wrong with a school system where tenured teachers are protected by their powerful union — even when they are failing children miserably.In June 2011, Osman Abugana, now 63, was accused of “inappropriately changing the scores from failing to passing” on the state Regents physics exam for five students at Medgar Evers College Preparatory, a public middle-high school in Brooklyn.“The deceit and dishonesty which the department finds to underlie this conduct are, in its view, moral failings which cannot be remediated,” according to a 2013 disciplinary opinion by a state-appointed arbitrator obtained by The Post.The DOE called for Abugana, then a 19-year veteran of the system, to be fired.“There is no option for a penalty in this case short of termination,” the DOE argued at the time, after a probe by its own Office of Special Investigations (OSI).The department said Abugana’s testimony at his administrative trial was “riddled with lies and misstatements” and made him “unfit” to teach.But Abugana, then 51, fought his firing with the help of New York State United Teachers’ union, which provides defense to NYC teachers in these hearings.Instead of firing him, the arbitrator suspended him for one semester and ordered him to take a course on proper testing and grading procedures.While he was under investigation and his case was being adjudicated, he would have spent close to three years in a DOE “rubber room,” the notorious holding spaces where disgraced teachers get paid to do nothing.Abugana is back in a classroom and makes $140,000 a year, records show.

He is still teaching physics, now at Edward R.Murrow High School in Brooklyn.But his teaching skills, and his grading ethics, are still under scrutiny.

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