Opinion

Put a lid on it, Cathie

Two weeks: That’s all it took for new Schools Chancellor Cathie Black to embarrass herself and her office.

At a meeting Thursday on school overcrowding, parents hit Black with some stark data: By 2015, Lower Manhattan will be short some 1,000 school seats.

Cue Cathie the Comedienne: “Could we just have some birth control for a while? It could really help us all out a lot.”

Don’t quit your . . . oh, never mind.

Sure, a Department of Education spokeswoman says that Black takes the overcrowding issue “very seriously.”

“She regrets if she left a different impression by making an off-handed joke in the course of that conversation.”

No doubt.

Still, the joke wasn’t even the worst of it. Black next tried being serious.

She told the group that every neighborhood has its own unique “issues” — and that everyone comes tugging at the DOE for help in different directions, making it impossible to satisfy all comers.

“So it is — and I don’t mean this in any flip way — it is, it is many Sophie’s Choices. With a, you know, with a board on the wall and saying duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.”

Sophie’s Choice?

So New York students either get the school of their parents’ preference or . . . transport to a Nazi death camp?

Now, we don’t think that the chancellor finds her students a burden, or thinks there are too many forgotten urchins in her schools.

But the circumstances of her ascension to the chancellorship were such that she has zero margin for error.

It’s inexcusable for her to make jokes where birth rates — always a sensitive issue among minority parents — are the underlying punch line.

And if Black wants to compare overcrowded city schools to packed-in Nazi cattle cars, she may very well be in the wrong line of work.

Certainly she needs to come to terms with the stark fact that, ex officio, she acquired many, many enemies when she became chancellor. They want her to fail, and they will do everything in their power to harm her and, by extension, her principal — Mayor Bloomberg.

Black has just given them much aid and comfort, unnecessarily so.

The chancellor truly needs to watch her words in the future.