Friday, March 07, 2008

It's Superintendent Race Day, and Track Conditions Are Favoring Inside Speed

dog-and-po·ny show
n. Slang
An elaborate presentation orchestrated to gain approval, as for a policy or product.
-The Free Dictionary

We'll keep it short this morning. No Daily Racing Form in-depth analysis with speed ratings of the candidates or insights about whether a particular candidate is a "mudder" or not. Just a timetable for today's events, and an updated betting line (Note: no exacta/trifecta wagering...2nd place don't mean nothin')

The six finalists will be in Albuquerque for open meetings with the public on Friday— a day before the board is scheduled to select one of them as the new superintendent.
Here's whom the candidates will meet with on Friday at the John Milne Community Board Room, 6400 Uptown Blvd. N.E.:
6:30-8 a.m.— APS student body officers.
11:30 a.m. - 1 p.m.— local business and government leaders.
4-5:30 p.m.— APS employees.
6-7:30 p.m.— APS parents and student family members.
-from the Albuquerque Journal (Note: Posted times have varied a bit I've noticed, these are taken from this morning's paper)

As you doubtlessly know, the "only paper you will ever need" has done profiles on each of the candidates (some including that little Q&A "have you ever been arrested" gotcha thing, some not). Armed with this information and little else, your humble blogger had adjusted the early morning line to the following:

Linda Sink: 1/3
Steve Flores: 7/2 (Note: a significant reduction in price from 50/1)
Winston Brooks: 4/1
Tom Miller: 15/1
Gary Norris: 35/1
Diego Gallegos: 99/1

It's still Sink's position to lose as we head into the Swimsuit Competition today (wait, wrong cheesy analogy, let's go with "today's Belmont Stakes" instead). I'm both cringing and looking forward to the APS Employee part of the shindig this afternoon. Teachers never seem to come off looking very good in this sort of forum, tending to resemble quite strongly a series of Geraldine Amatos in both the hyper-specificity of their bitterness and the indecipherable construction of their arguments.

I expect plenty of questions like "Remember that time that Johnny got lunch detention at (insert former President here) Middle School, and you let him out of lunch detention because his entire family had been wiped out in a typhoon and I told you then and I'll tell you now that the International Monetary Fund and Big Oil are responsible for student's "sagging" and using IPods and violating other school rules in a way that makes a teacher's job impossible. Impossible I tell ya! IMPOSSIBLE!"

Well, it's "Post Time"....somebody cue the trumpet player.


4 comments:

ched macquigg said...

Add to your question, the question that even Geraldine Amato will not be allowed to ask;

Do you have the character and courage to be the senior most administrative role model of the student standard of conduct?"

any answer except yes
is no.

Al Garcia said...

You know, I was at the APS building this morning at 6:30 and it was quite a gathering....it was like Cocktail Hour, except it was 6:30AM and apparently no drinks were served...

I think the candidate who does the best in the APS Social scene gets the job...it's all about politics!

Anonymous said...

Al, I was at the 4:00 gathering, and yes you are absolutly correct. As soon as Sink did her dog and pony show, about 1/3 of her supporters left with quite a few candidates yet to go.

Anonymous said...

It can't be about politics. Our search committee doesn't seem to have the ability to reason at that level. 48 candidates, and these 6 are the best we could glean? $260,000 doesn't buy much these days, I guess. I have four reasons why we should scrap these candidates completely, and begin a new search with different criteria: (1) the primary business of this industry is instruction, but none of the candidates could talk about it in concrete terms; (2) the primary job of the super is to make oneself and the system invisible instead of a stumbling block to instruction; (3) the candidates are lying; (4) uh...."I forget number four," to quote one of the lying candidates.

We must choose wisely.