#NYC Department of Education Dysfunction

We start with the good news. In an agency notorious for a lack of consequences, it’s heartening that the Department of Education has moved to terminate Khurshid Abdul-Mutakabbir, a principal who fixed grades at his former school, Maspeth HS in Queens.

Now, the bad news: What took so long?

Why did it take a group of whistleblowers and a front-page story in The Post for the DOE to investigate what students and teachers sneeringly called “the Maspeth minimum”? Why did it take two years to conduct that inquiry and decide to fire him?

Abdul-Mutakabbir was reporting graduation rates of 99 percent — a figure so out of the norm that it should have raised alarms, or at least some eyebrows.

The answer, of course, is that they didn’t want to know.

Post reporters Susan Edelman and Carl Campanile have done a phenomenal job for years documenting the “just pass ’em” culture in New York City schools.

In 2014, Edelman wrote how students at Manhattan’s Murry Bergtraum HS could skip classes all year, watch a video, answer a couple questions online and still pass.

The next year, Campanile exposed the “Easy Pass” program at Dewey HS in Brooklyn, where kids got a science credit for watching “Jurassic Park.”

Also in 2015, a graduate of William Cullen Bryant HS in Queens confessed to Edelman that she skipped almost all her early morning classes, yet they “gave me a ­diploma I didn’t deserve.”

Her teacher’s response? “It was not an ideal situation. If we don’t meet our academic goals, we are deemed failures as teachers. There is a tremendous amount of pressure on us as teachers. I thought it was in her best interest and the school’s best interest to pass her.”

In almost all these cases, the city did nothing. The difference with Abdul-Mutakabbir, perhaps, is he was so blatant about it. Test answers were erased and corrected. Grades were changed across the board. And his teachers had finally had enough.

But make no mistake: These sort of shenanigans are happening all over. Rather than holding a child back to learn, too many students are ushered along. Some argue that it isn’t fair to fail them. They’ve already been failed by the system.

Mayor de Blasio’s administration has been more preoccupied with the racial makeup of the city’s top schools, rather than the problems of the struggling ones. His response to The Post’s stories has been a shrug, a disparagement of our reporters, and a boast about his “transformative” leadership.

The Department of Education illegally blocks our freedom of information requests, then slanders us as racists for pointing out the problems.

Parents are fed up. When she worried about the education her African-American son was getting at PS 147 in Cambria Heights, Queens, mom Keisha Ellis was told by one teacher to change schools.

Many have. A record number of students left the system this year for charter, religious, private schools — or Florida. Others in the same district as Ellis’ son in Queens are suing for change, demanding the DOE do more.

The response so far has been to lower yardsticks for all students, figuring that if not enough kids are passing tests or classes, that the problem must be the standards — not the teaching. It’s a scandal.

Even in the pandemic year, with its patchwork of remote and hybrid, get ready for the city to announce that graduation levels hit another record high. De Blasio will call a press conference to brag about it. And it’ll all be a lie.