‘Unbiased’ Department of Education just got caught playing rank politics

“It might be problematic for word to get out that the DOE is encouraging folks to make noise,” wrote anti-testing activist Miriam Nunberg. But word did get out, and “problematic” isn’t the half of it.

Nunberg, co-chair of the New York City Alliance for School Integration and Desegregation, had already blasted word that top Department of Education officials were actively pushing for opposition to PLACE, a parents’ group trying to maintain standards in the city school system — specifically, the screened admissions at some of the city’s best middle and high schools.

The Post’s Selim Algar got his hands on both Nunberg’s original e-mail enthusiastically passing along the DOE request, and her followup asking people to keep quiet about how the supposedly nonpolitical bureaucrats are playing political hardball.

Chancellor Richard Carranza has gone to war against all selective admissions, charging that any effort to uphold standards is racist. To him, the top schools are bastions of “white privilege” — never mind that white students are usually in the minority at those schools.

And he’s exploiting the pandemic in his war: The state’s cancellation of year-end testing — and his own decision to end serious grading and all attendance-taking — badly complicates screening for the next round of selective middle-school admissions.

Carranza’s on record saying it’s wrong to “waste” this crisis. So when his DOE insists, “We have not yet made any decisions on this policy, and will not do so without hearing first from our students and families,” you’re right to roll your eyes.

Meanwhile, the chancellor still refuses to confront the real problem: Far too many public schools in the city’s poor and minority communities just don’t work — even as public charter schools in the same ’hoods regularly achieve excellence.

Carranza needs to quit trying to undermine schools that work and focus on replacing the ones that don’t.