NEWLY INSTALLED New York Schools Chancellor Cathie Black has no educational experience--and has no problems showing it, or her overwhelming sense of privilege.
At a recent meeting with parents to discuss overcrowding in lower Manhattan schools, Black told the assembled crowd that there's a simple solution: birth control.
"Could we just have some birth control for a while?" Black said. "It would really help us." Har har.
Of course, such a flip response isn't so funny when you're a parent of a kid whose education is negatively impacted by overcrowding. "I always cringe when I hear that (joke)," Public School 234 parent Tricia Joyce told the New York Daily News. "I understand the temptation to joke about it. But our situation isn't funny any more."
As New York Daily News columnist Michael Daly noted, Black's joke is even more disturbing when you consider that many of the schools with the worst overcrowding problems are located in poor and predominantly minority neighborhoods:
But the parents at that downtown Manhattan meeting were overwhelmingly white and well-off, which may have been why she felt she could make the joke in the first place.
She knows that those folks are not going to think she is really telling them to stop breeding.
The rich white lady from Manhattan might have received a very different reaction had she attempted that humor in a poor neighborhood where hope lives in the children and the realization of that hope resides in education.
The poor have historically been told by people of Black's station to stop breeding and being such a burden.
To add further insult, Black went on to call meeting the needs of different public schools "many 'Sophie's Choices'"--a reference to the movie in which a mother arriving at Auschwitz is forced to sacrifice one of her children so the other can live.
One thing parents are understandably worried about is which kids, exactly, Black thinks it's okay to sacrifice.
"As we all know, one child dies (in the movie). This isn't optional," Joyce added. "We have a right to a public school seat."
