sign, sign, everywhere a sign

I took some pic-a-choors:

Again with the random italics.  What could be meant by it?  Like, nobody would have ever believed our crappy school system could pull off a feat like this?  ("That's right: New York City!"—just as one might reasonably have said "New York City is the safest big city in the country" when that was news, because it runs contrary to assumptions.)  Or is the ad speaking to tourists and essentially saying, "What has your busted-ass city accomplished?"  (As in, "My daddy won the Nobel Prize.")*

No standing.  Haw.

Well done, citizen!  (Click to enlarge, although the crappiness of the image shames me.)

Unhelpful citizen.  Whoever is responsible for this graffiti is a moron.  I don't know this comedian or his show, but a seven-year-old reader of Mad would be able to detect the irony in this advertisement.  Few things are more pathetic than attempted satire that is dumber than the thing it's satirizing; the really sad thing about the dude who added the prefix is that he didn't realize it was already there.

* Side note:  Is increasing graduation rates necessarily a good thing?  I should think that how graduation rates are increased is of central importance.  Is it that students are doing better in school, or is that graduation standards have lowered?  (Remember in the 1990s when they changed the scoring system for the SATs?  Unless I'm misremembering, they basically were like, "Yeah, kids are scoring too low—it's embarrassing—so we're just gonna, like, you know...raise the scores."  Good job, everyone!)