New York state once believed poor children could meet high expectations.

When I mentioned that Mississippi has become a national model for improving children’s literacy, my fellow panelists laughed out loud.

These weren’t know-nothings, but academics, journalists and public-policy professionals.

Yet they were incredulous: What could New York possibly have to learn from a backward state like Mississippi?

Quite a lot, as it happens.

On the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card, Mississippi’s fourth-graders outperformed ours in reading.

Black and Hispanic fourth-graders there scored much higher than their peers in New York, even though Mississippi spends a fraction of what we do on public education.

For generations, New York boasted of the seriousness of its educational institutions.

We built one of America’s great public university systems and some of its most selective public high schools.

Our state Board of Regents predates the US Constitution.

That seriousness was still very much alive when I became a fifth-grade teacher in the South Bronx in 2002, soon after Michael Bloomberg won mayoral control of the schools.

Under Chancellor Joel Klein, charter schools were welcomed with open arms.

Philanthropists and education entrepreneurs flocked to a New York that was determined to become a national center of education reform.

Underlying it was a bedrock belief that poor children can achieve at high levels.

Poverty made education more difficult, but did not excuse failure.

When students weren’t learning, the proper response was better teaching, stronger schools and higher expectations.

That idea has fallen entirely out of fashion — and today, New York’s academic results are stubbornly mediocre.

Worse, Albany has spent much of the past two decades weakening expectations and abandoning accountability mechanisms designed to produce better results.

The state expanded appeals and alternative pathways around graduation requirements.

By 2018, nearly half of NYC high schools were using “credit recovery” programs for students who’d failed or never completed required courses.

Incredibly, the state eliminated a basic literacy skills test for prospective teachers in 2017 and certification requirements five years later.

A restrictive cap prohibits any new charters in New York City, despite their popularity and track record of success.

And this week, the state Board of Regents accelerated the decline.

Members decided that with the class of 2028, New York’s students will no longer have to pass Regents exams to receive a high-school diploma.

The exams themselves will remain, but the state will sever the link between passing them and graduating — the very thing that gave the Regents exams their meaning and consequence for generations.

Regent Felicia Thomas-Williams captured the philosophical change: “You don’t assess a fish on climbing a tree because fish can’t climb trees,” she said.

Children aren’t fish, and reading isn’t tree-climbing.

Reading, writing, mathematics, science and history aren’t innate talents that some children possess and others simply don’t.

They are things that schools exist to instill.

There’s nothing compassionate about looking at a child who has not been taught well and concluding that perhaps reading proficiency was the wrong thing to demand of him.

Which brings me back to Mississippi.

While New York spent years minimizing the need to require achievement, Mississippi concentrated on teaching children to read.

It embraced evidence-based reading instruction, invested in teacher training and coaching, identified struggling readers early, and intervened when children fell behind.

And it got better: Its fourth graders now outperform ours in reading for a fraction of the cost.

That ought to humble us.

The New York education system I entered nearly a quarter-century ago was deeply imperfect; the reformers of that era made mistakes, sometimes enormous ones.  

But they were ambitious for children.

They believed poor children could learn more than they were learning.

They believed schools could get better.

They believed achievement gaps were problems to be solved.

And when children failed to meet an academic standard, their first impulse was to ask what adults must do differently.

New York has not earned the right to abandon that principle.

We haven’t conquered illiteracy or closed achievement gaps.

We spend more than anybody and produce mediocre results.

Yet we retain enough of our old self-regard to laugh at Mississippi.

We shouldn’t.

New York’s educational pride has outlived much of the educational ambition that once justified it.

The embarrassing thing isn’t that New York might have something to learn from Mississippi: It’s that we still find the idea funny.

Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former New York City public school teacher.