We’ve known it all along and now we have proof: The Department of Education has intentionally set up struggling large high schools to fail.

According to a new report, the DOE has for years been disproportionately assigning late-enrolling students to these high schools.

For a variety of reasons, these “over-the-counter” students — many of whom are new immigrants or special-needs, over-age, homeless or previously incarcerated students — don’t participate in the high school selection process in the spring, but instead seek to enroll during the school year.

The mayor’s and the DOE’s decision to shunt these students to already struggling schools is an outrage. The DOE made it impossible for teachers to teach and students to learn. Programming at the affected schools was upended, with changes being made as late as a month into classes. With classes filled to capacity, it became difficult in many schools to provide students with the courses they needed to graduate. In some cases, teachers had to unexpectedly take on additional classes or teach out of license in order to meet the demand.

Imagine the frustration of teachers who had prepared for the year and whose entire programs were then thrown into chaos. Imagine the disappointment that students who were happy with their courses and studying hard must have felt when they were shuffled to different classes with different teachers and had to start over. How could any teaching or learning take place under these conditions?

Nevertheless, teachers at these schools made heroic efforts to accommodate the new students arriving in September and throughout the school year. Some even started special programs aimed at meeting their specific needs, like Columbus HS’s Women’s Empowerment and Boys to Men programs.

But the DOE was ruthless. It starved schools of support, refusing to provide additional resources to help them cope with the influx of high-needs students and completely abdicating its moral and legal duty to provide all students with a quality education. Then it penalized these same schools when their over-the-counter students didn’t achieve at the same level as all other students.

The DOE didn’t fail our students and schools — it sabotaged them.