|
CHAOS THEORY
Mayor Bloomberg, Joel Klein and Ray Kelly proudly announced last week that five of the 16 schools on the city's "most dangerous" list had become safe enough over the past several months that their names could now be removed.
But before anyone could get too excited, the trio also announced (much more quietly) that conditions in six other schools had deteriorated enough during those same months that their names would now be added to the list, bringing the total number of "impact schools" to 17.
Justifiable suspicions regarding the way the city's been calculating its crime statistics aside, this got us to wondering. You remove five schools, then add six. The mayor said last week that the initiative was "never meant to sit still," but was it nevertheless supposed to remain in some sort of balance? Were these six new schools on a waiting list for dangerous schools? Were they at Class of 1999 levels too, just not lucky enough to get picked sooner? Is there a limit to the number of "impact schools" the city is willing to focus on at any one time?
Or does the switch-off instead represent the mysterious and uncontainable flow of youthful destructive energy in the universe (or more specifically, within the NYC school system)?
After you move the cops into an "impact school" and they begin the crackdown on rampant hooliganism, does that collective, newly repressed violence flow out of the school and go searching for a new outlet? Does this explain why crime in one school drops just as it rises in another? Is this some new and exciting (and quite unexpected) expression of the law of conservation of matter?
Or is it just another sham sitting atop a pack of lies designed to make Klein and Bloomberg look like they're actually doing something?
