Credit Gov. Kathy Hochul with recognizing that New York needs to drastically up its game when it comes to teaching kids to read — but mock her for paying the state teachers’ union to produce a better curriculum.

Mississippi and other deep-south states are working miracles in teaching literacy, having embraced the insights of the “science of reading” movement; Hochul two years ago decided New York could catch up by . . . paying millions to New York State United Teachers to draw up lesson plans to match those gains.

She vowed that revamp instruction would boost reading scores by double digits.

Oops: NYSUT took the money and produced utter garbage that ignores the science and instead relies on the completely discredited “balanced literacy” approach — the very nonsense that Mayor Eric Adams’ NYC Reads initiative had rightly rejected after it failed children for 30 years.

As one critic snarked, “We’ve spent $10 million on this? Can I get a refund?”

Boy, if only we could. 

New York spends far more per student than any other state, yet our academic outcomes are middling at best. 

And now our fourth-graders are falling ever-further behind their Mississippi peers in reading.

Cut to the classic movie “Animal House,” when a senior frat brother tells the freshman whose borrowed car they just trashed: “Face it, you f—ked up. You trusted us.”

Hochul messed up in trusting NYSUT, and New Yorkers messed up in trusting the gov — and the kids are stuck paying the price.