NEW YORK – Forty New York City schools made the state’s list of “persistently dangerous” schools this year, up over 60 percent from 25 schools in 2012, the New York Post reports.     

The undesirable designations were awarded by the New York education department to schools based on a formula that considers the number of incidents of assaults, weapons possessions, harassments and other violent crimes in relation to the number of enrolled students.

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The drastic increase brings the total number of unsafe New York City schools to the highest level since the department began tracking violent incidents in 2005, according to the Post.

What’s ironic is that “the rise in dangerous schools coincides with a 27.2 percent drop in suspensions from 2011 to 2013 and a 6 percent decline in school crime this academic year compared with last year,” New York police told the news site.

“We do not believe that schools are more dangerous now,” Tom Dunn, state education spokesman, told the Post.

New York City education officials said the same thing, even taking it a step further to insist schools are actually getting safer.

The conflicting statistics seem to suggest that schools were either under-reporting violent incidents in years past, or fewer incidents are resulting in suspension or criminal charges.

There is some evidence to suggest it’s the latter.

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According to Investor’s Business Daily, an anti-suspension policy imposed on school districts by the U.S. Department of Education is resulting in an increase in violence, disruptions and threats against teachers in several large metropolitan schools.

“In 2011, the Education Department accused the Los Angeles Unified School District of discriminating against black boys, who were suspended for bad behavior at a disproportionate rate. The agency ordered it to reduce suspensions in the hopes that unruly minority students would stay in school and graduate,” the news site reports.

The government decreed that “the district shall develop and implement a comprehensive plan to eliminate the disproportionality in the discipline imposed on African-American students,” and district officials complied by removing “willful defiance” as grounds for suspension, IBD reports.

The result was that school bullies and other thugs are now disrupting class and running amok because there are no real consequences for their actions. The LA district’s suspension rate dropped to a rock-bottom 1.5 percent, but student violence went through the roof, according to teachers who spoke with IBD.

“We now have a restorative justice counselor, but we still have the same problems. Kids aren’t even suspended for fights or drugs,” one of the teachers said.

The same federal policy was reportedly foisted upon Oakland schools and others with similar results. While it’s not immediately clear whether such an anti-suspension policy was imposed on New York City schools, the state eased up on its student disciplinary code in 2012 at the urging of City Council members and the New York Civil Liberties Union, according to the Huffington Post.

The ridiculous federal mandates stem from a perverse progressive mindset centered around the ideas of “social justice” and “white privilege” that are increasingly infecting schools across the country.

Considering that it’s so cool to be progressive in the Big Apple, it certainly leaves the impression that New York could be experiencing the same dangerous consequences of Obama’s policies as Oakland and LA.