Opinion

Battleground Bergtraum

It looked more like a jail riot than a high-school hallway dust-up: scores of teens videotaped in Manhattan’s Murry Bergtraum HS this month — pushing, screaming and battling police.

One student punched a police sergeant in the face during the melee — totally without consequence.

Sadly, it was just another day at Bergtraum — once a jewel of a high school, but today something much less.

Students and faculty alike view it as little more than a supersized failure factory where a mere 18 percent of kids graduate college-ready, and where fights break out nearly every day.

Things are so bad that the Department of Education labeled Bergtraum one of nine “impact schools” in 2010, based on the frequent violent incidents on its campus.

As The Post’s Maureen Callahan reported Sunday, when teachers hear a hallway commotion, they rush to lock their classroom doors and keep the disturbance at bay.

It’s the new normal: “These kids know it’s a riot over nothing, that no one can stop it and, at some point, it will end,” she wrote.

Or as one 15-year-old sophomore told Callahan: “It’s hell . . . The teachers don’t know how to control [their students].”

Once one of the city’s top public schools, Bergtraum has turned into a D-rated slough over the past decade — perhaps an unintended consequence of the DOE’s decision to close large, failing schools and open numerous small schools in their place.

The new system has helped raise graduation rates at those smaller schools and closed nearly half the achievement gap between white and minority students.

But this very real progress is not without serious consequence.

“We’re getting the runoff of the schools systematically closed under [Mayor] Bloomberg,” one teacher said. “All of those undesirables get pushed off here.”

Translation: It’s safe for kids in the small schools; at Bergtraum, the worst of the worst have the run of the place.

DOE officials say they’re tackling violence at Bergtraum by deploying extra school-safety agents and a borough safety director to “live” on campus, while using 70 security cameras in the halls and stairwells.

But their “holistic approach” isn’t getting the job done, so they’ve also dispatched four more cops to the school — meaning there are now five policemen patrolling the six floors there.

That should certainly help.

If Bergtraum has to call in another squad of cops to restore order, so be it.

Bottom line: If the city can’t handle the student body at Bergtraum, there is at least one alternative school — the one on Riker’s Island, where students earn a cap and gown while wearing their jail greens.

Punching a cop should matter.