What should happen to a high school principal who can’t educate kids but cheats to pretend that he can? In New York City, he gets a happy handshake and a $1.8 million payday.

That’s the latest from the compost heap masquerading as the city Department of Education — which took two years to boot former Maspeth High School principal Khurshid Abdul-Mutakabbir for egregiously inflating graduation rates. Then it turned around and awarded him a seven-year sinecure worth almost $260,000 annually, not counting step raises, a pension and lifetime health insurance.

Maybe crime doesn’t pay — but bamboozling the Department of Education sure can.

There appears to be no work involved in Abdul-Mutakabbir’s soft landing, according to this newspaper’s stellar Susan Edelman. She first reported the Maspeth scandal in 2019, then followed it through years of official foot-dragging and finally pried out the latest damning details.

In sum, Abdul-Mutakabbir dragooned Maspeth teachers and staff into graduating manifestly unqualified students, at one point reporting an outlandish 99% graduation rate. This should have been a distress flare, but no such luck — because, as we shall see, nobody cared.

A report prepared by DOE’s special commissioner of investigation quoted Abdul- Mutakabbir’s operating philosophy: “I don’t care if a kid shows up at 7:44 and you dismiss at 7:45, it’s your job to give that kid credit.”

Along with this came fundamentally worthless diplomas — which Abdul-Mutakabbir also acknowledged: Kids can “have fun working at Taco Bell,” per the report.

Shockingly, Abdul-Mutakabbir’s behavior is not the essential scandal here. What happened next was worse.

Two long years passed before Abdul-Mutakabbir was fired — if you can call what happened to him a firing — and the message broadcast by the delay is at least as outrageous as the scandal itself: Do your worst and then relax because kids don’t count — and in the end, New York’s execrable public education culture will protect its own.

Abdul-Mutakabbir’s punishment, if that’s what it can be called, is that he’ll never again be a principal in the New York City school system. But at age 47, he will have a desk, a regular paycheck, holidays and vacations, followed by a pension and perks at 55 — but he apparently will have to do no actual work.

For some people, this would be a win-win, but whatever it might be, it’s certainly no deterrent. Other Department of Education drones now scheming and scamming surely have taken note.

Why not? The potential pickings are rich, and the risk — now broadcast more loudly than ever — is minimal.

What a racket, right?

The Department of Education will spend $38 billion in the school year ending in June; on a per-student basis, no big-city system spends more — and the results range from dreary to affirmatively destructive to tens of thousands of New York’s most vulnerable children.

With sharply declining enrollment — it’s down to 940,000 from 1.1 million three years ago — and a chronic truancy rate pushing 40% after eight years in the hands of Mayor Bill de Blasio and his hack pseudo-administrators, the system may well have entered terminal decline.

Certainly its central focus isn’t on educating children — student performance standards, unserious in recent years, are evaporating — but rather on boosting pay, pensions and perks for the DOE’s 100,000-plus employees and its uncounted, parasitical, not-for-profit affiliates.

Nominal control of the schools resides with City Hall, at least until that governing authority expires in June, but the department’s unions have had the system in a hammerlock for decades. Abdul-Mutakabbir’s golden parachute testifies to that.

So Mayor Eric Adams has six weeks or so to persuade the union-dominated Legislature to renew school control. Can he do it? And what will he do with formal authority if he retains it?

Clawing back Abdul-Mutakabbir’s big payday would be a good way to demonstrate that he means to fight for public education. And making an example of the people responsible for it wouldn’t hurt either.

If that’s not possible — or if Adams doesn’t have the stomach to try — well, then, what’s the point of mayoral control?

That is, if a mayor can’t win little fights that matter, what hope is there when the big battles start — as inevitably they will?

The Abdul-Mutakabbir settlement is a deeply symbolic insult to New York City, its taxpayers and — most important — to its children. It is significant far beyond its particulars.

If Eric Adams and his schools chancellor, David Banks, can live with it, then they can live with anything — and that’s a terrible message for a new mayor to be sending.

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