A top state education official said she was troubled by the cheating scandals uncovered by The Post and urged educators to focus more on “teaching and learning” instead of “getting a number.”

“I want a diploma to mean something,” said Board of Regents member Kathleen Cashin, a former top city school superintendent.

Cashin said passing students along eventually gets exposed because they arrive elsewhere unprepared. “We have kids in college who can’t read or write. But the high-school graduation rates are high. It’s a serious problem,” she said.

Many public high schools boast graduation rates above 70 percent, while fewer than 10 percent of kids are deemed ready for CUNY’s academic course-work and have to take remedial courses, studies show.

The Post’s cheating series published this week focused on a parade of city educators who gave students answers on state exams and altered scores or inflated grades. The stories were based on records obtained after a two-year legal fight with the city’s Department of Education.

New Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza said he would like to see New York lessen the emphasis on standardized tests, which would reduce the pressure on teachers.

“No one has ever heard me talk about an emphasis on test scores. In fact I’ve been very clear about students aren’t the sum total of a single test,” Carranza told The Post during a recent interview.

“I’ve never been a proponent that says a teacher should be evaluated out because of their [students’] test scores. There are too many variables.”

Gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon released an education plan Wednesday that would bar the use of state-exam results to evaluate teachers and reduce the number of high-stakes tests, which a spokeswoman said would discourage cheating.

But a former deputy schools chancellor during the Bloomberg administration said blaming cheating on the test pressures is a “cop-out.”

“If you don’t know how to teach children, you can cheat or you can fail. Some choose to cheat,” said Eric Nadelstern, now a professor at Teachers College Columbia University. “If they teach students well, they’ll do well on the test and they don’t have to resort to cheating.”

Nadelstern said there’s less pressure on educators to cheat now than during the Bloomberg years, which held supervisors and teachers accountable for student performance. The de Blasio administration passed a rule requiring promotion be based on multiple criteria rather than solely on state test results.