Mayor de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza are already moving ahead with part of their drive to racially re-engineer the city’s top high schools — at great risk to the kids they claim to be helping.

What they’ve done is reshape the decades-old Discovery program in such a way as to greatly increase the chances that it’ll send students to schools where they’re just not ready to do the work.

Since 1971, Discovery has allowed disadvantaged teens who score just under the admissions cutoff on the Specialized High School Admission Test to take summer classes that prepare them for the rigorous college-level coursework of these high schools. Those who completed the program won admission via slots the schools had set aside for Discovery.

This allowed, for example, a low-income student who didn’t quite score enough to make it into Stuyvesant (but did get an offer from, say, Brooklyn Tech) to still earn his or her place into the school widely seen as the “top of the top.”

As Larry Cary of the Brooklyn Tech Alumni Foundation notes, Discovery was a significant factor in the school becoming majority black and Hispanic from the mid-’70s through the mid-’90s.

Why mess with it now? Well, to be fair, Team de Blasio isn’t the first to meddle. A change two decades back made it so that any school opting to take Discovery kids couldn’t “poach” from those admitted to other “elites.” That meant Stuyvesant would have had to admit kids who’d scored even further below its cutoff, so the principal at the time regretfully withdrew from Discovery, and Bronx Science limited its participation.

Team de Blasio forced Stuyvesant back into the program a year ago. But it’s adding further to the “mismatch” risk by the way it’s shifted who qualifies for Discovery. The “problem”: Last year, 64 percent of the students in Discovery were Asian, and another 11 percent white. Such numbers can’t yield the major boosts in black and Hispanic enrollment that de Blasio wants.

So the mayor’s minions changed who qualifies for the program. It’s no longer based on a simple question of whether your family income qualifies you for free or reduced-price lunches.

Instead, you have to attend a “high-poverty” middle school — with the line drawn to largely exclude ones with a lot of Asians.

This excludes a good number of kids who would’ve been near the top of the Discovery pool — so the program will wind up sending more students with lower scores on the entrance exam to the city’s toughest high schools.

On top of that, de Blasio is gradually increasing the Discovery pool to first one-tenth, and soon a full fifth, of all elite-school entrants.

In short, the mayor’s all but guaranteeing that a lot of these kids, while smart, may have a very tough time flourishing in the high school he’s maneuvering them into.

That could easily end up shattering the confidence of teens who’d otherwise have been on track to solid success.

If you want more black and Hispanic kids to get top-flight high-school educations, far better to simply create more selective high schools — adding opportunity rather than redistributing it.

While you’re at it, add more gifted or otherwise-enriched programs in neighborhoods that now lack them, to better prepare kids for the entry exam.

Instead of fixing what isn’t broken, fix the parts of the system that keep failing so many children.

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