Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal and the facts from the fiction.

So spoke a young Martin Luther King Jr. nearly seven decades ago.

Had he lived, the Baptist preacher would have turned 86 today. He understood that without a decent education, black children would never have the tools they needed to take advantage of the political rights won by the civil-rights movement he led.

So ask yourself this: What would the Rev. Dr. King have said about a New York state where the vast majority of African-American students either drop out of school before they have earned their high-school diploma or graduate without the knowledge they need to get a good job or go to college?

About a racial gap where New York’s Asian and white students are more than twice as likely to be proficient in math and English as their black classmates?

Or about a state system where one out of every five African-American children outside New York City attends a severely failing public school — compared with one out of every fifty white and Asian children?

In his all-too-short lifetime, Martin Luther King pointed to the better America he always knew was within our reach, and he brought us a long way on that journey.

But what kind of victory is it to kick Jim Crow out of the South, only to see a warped version of it operating in the Empire State’s public-school system?