There are many moments New Yorkers might focus on as they contemplate why Cathie Black, our improbable schools chancellor, is, as the Times reported, out already, just a few months after Mayor Bloomberg confused everyone by picking her. You don’t get a seventeen per cent approval rating without real effort.
But here’s my favorite, perhaps because it has to do with the particular zone my child is enrolled in, and also says something about the way the city has responded to the legacy of September 11th. As Black heard at a meeting with downtown parents (video above, via the Tribeca Trib), the area around Ground Zero is, in many ways, doing inspiringly well: through some combination of resilience, urban stubborness, and construction-tax incentives, the population has doubled downtown. This means that the same schools that were evacuated on September 11th are now badly overcrowded. My child’s school, with many more kindergarteners than fifth graders, resembles one of those developing countries in which half the population is under the age of eighteen. Black’s answer?
After some nervous laughter, a parent repeats that he’s talking about children who are already born. Black says, in effect, that things are tough all around—even on the Upper East side.
Holocaust metaphors are rarely a good idea. The head of a public-school system using one that involves picking one child for the Nazis to send to the gas chambers—which was Sophie’s choice in the novel—is really not a good idea. I’ll be curious to see what Black does next.
