Scores of faith and community leaders joined UFT President Michael Mulgrew for a wide-ranging discussion on education and educational inequity at the union’s fifth annual faith-based breakfast on April 16.

Mulgrew thanked the leaders — including rabbis, priests, imams and ministers — assembled at UFT headquarters for their support during the recent fight to block Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s harmful education agenda and to refocus the issue on the underfunding of city schools.

Although public schools statewide got a $1.6 billion boost in the final budget — the largest in eight years — the division of that funding increase among school districts only exacerbated the state’s unequal funding, Mulgrew said.

“The neediest kids still get the least amount of money,” he said. “There was no excuse not to tackle this issue.”

The state’s distribution of education funding, which has favored wealthier school districts, has been a point of contention in New York State. It was the catalyst for the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, filed in 1993.

The state changed its foundation aid formula after the highest court ruled in the case that the state had failed to meet its constitutional obligation to provide a “sound, basic education” to all school children and ordered it to increase annual school aid to the neediest districts.

But Mulgrew said that the state pulled back its education funding in 2008, when the recession hit. Making matters worse, 60 percent of this year’s aid increase was distributed through a different mechanism that favors the wealthier districts.

“We are going to have to go to court to force this,” he said.

Keynote speaker Rev. Clinton Miller, from Brown Memorial Baptist Church in Brooklyn, also spoke about inequity: the inequity that exists between district and charter schools.

The corporate charter school sector has created a “system of haves and have-nots,” said the former Brownsville public school teacher.

Miller called on those present to speak out for homeless, immigrant and other at-risk students excluded or expelled from charters.

“As people of the cloth, isn’t it our charge to fight for those who have not been called?” he asked.

“It doesn’t matter whether you win the fight. It matters whether you fight the fight,” he said. “I say today to the UFT to continue the fight.”

Deacon Ricardo Shark of the Higher Praise Community Church in the East Bronx and a member of the advisory board at PS 30, a Community Learning School in East Harlem, echoed Miller’s call to action.

“Faith is wonderful, but faith without works is dead,” Shark said.

Anthony Harmon, the union’s director of parent and community outreach and the organizer of the breakfast, said the union’s message about educational inequity had registered with the faith-based leaders.

“As religious leaders, they share our fundamental belief in treating others with respect, dignity and equality,” Harmon said. “They stand with us in our fight for education equity.”