The Issue: City paying principal fired for grade-fixing and cheating nearly $2 million over next seven years.

Unfortunately, the Mas­peth HS cheating scandal isn’t an isolated incident (“City Lets Cheater Principal Prosper,” April 17).

Grade-fixing and cheating go on at most city high schools. Just about every one has some version of credit recovery, where failing students can come in one day for an hour or two of busy work, say 10 Hail Marys and have their failing grades changed to passing marks.

It’s virtually impossible to stay honest. If principals failed every student who legitimately flunked courses or did not read on a secondary-school level, 50% of our kids would never graduate. What principal or assistant principal could retain their job if he or she graded with integrity?

Ditto for teachers. Staffers without tenure would be terminated if they flunked too many kids. Teachers are constantly pressured by principals and assistant principals to up their passing rates.

Robert Grandt

Manhattan

If new schools Chancellor David Banks is serious about moving more “aggressively and expeditiously to remove those people from our schools and payroll” who commit “egregious actions,” then he should do the following: Assign offenders such as former Maspeth HS Principal Khurshid Abdul-Mutakabbir to the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR). These are the people who make up the system’s roving substitute teacher pool.

Let Abdul-Mutakabbir’s phone start ringing at five or six in the morning for a day’s teaching work at some of the neediest schools in our city, and you’ll see: he won’t stick around for long.

He probably got into administration in the first place to escape teaching. As an ATR, he would be reliving his worst nightmare.

John Sheridan

The Bronx

Sunday’s headline and story were all you need to know about how completely broken the city’s public school system is.

For the DOE to pay this man another nickel — let alone almost $2 million over the next seven years — is incomprehensible. He betrayed every tenet of good education that our young people deserve.

If Mayor Adams and Banks allow this travesty to stand, the system will never change, and they will have no credibility with the parents and students in the city.

It’s a complete disgrace and an insult to every teacher and administrator who works hard to do the right thing for the kids.

Robert DiNardo

Farmingdale

Whenever I read yet another highly disturbing story like The Post’s excellent exposé of the Maspeth school scandal, I am inevitably left with the same nagging, disturbing question.

When will supposedly sophisticated New Yorkers wise up to the embedded incompetence, unprofessionalism and self-serving corruption that has characterized the city’s Department of Education and its leadership for so long?

Whatever the details of the current scandal involving Principal Abdul-Mutakabbir (enabled by the usual suspects), the DOE “leadership” in cahoots with the self-aggrandizing teachers’ union bears the ultimate responsibility for this lack of appropriate oversight.

All these outrageous displays of embedded DOE corruption ultimately amount to serial abuse of students and their taxpaying parents, who have every right to expect professionalism and competence.

It seems the only remedy would be a top-to-bottom house-cleaning of the DOE.

John Jaffe

Orefield, Pa.

Taxpayers are funding this cretin to the tune of nearly $2 million. Fake classes, fake grades: is it any wonder we’re witnessing a decline in academia?

What’s even more pathetic is that this isn’t uncommon. So-called rubber rooms are holding on to teachers for eons, with high salaries no less, and the dumbing down continues ad nauseam.

Kevin Judge, Naples

Shows you just how inept and corrupt the public school system is.

Robert Leavy

Middle Village