Rob Nikolewski
Today, good readers, you get two opinion pieces in one column.
Here’s the first: The decision of the Santa Fe school board to ditch Superintendent Bobbie Gutierrez by buying out her contract for $168,428.
Now, that’s a lot of money to pay somebody to no longer work for you, but I have another number to keep in mind: 53 percent.
That’s the graduation rate of public school students in Santa Fe.
Fifty-three percent! That’s a number associated with a Third World nation, yet that’s the figure for this, the capital city in the Land of Enchantment.
Here are some other numbers:
• The graduation rate ranks 88th out of 89 districts statewide.
• Fifty-five of the state’s 56 districts that have higher percentages of students who qualify for free and reduced lunches still managed to have higher graduation rates than Santa Fe.
• A mere 21 percent of seventh-graders are proficient at math and just 32 percent at reading.
I’m not saying Gutierrez is the reason why those numbers are abysmal. But when you’re the leader of the school system — and have been since 2008 — you have to account for the results during your tenure.
All this while the school district has pursued a policy of closing down smaller schools, zeroed out bad scores from achievement data to make results look better and spent $1.4 million for a reading program that even Gutierrez admitted she came to hate.
The priorities for Santa Fe Public Schools have been awry for too long, and the attitude of previous school boards was akin to browsing for wallpaper patterns while the house is on fire.
The current system is not working, and at least a newly installed school board has some sense of urgency to turn things around before 47 percent of our kids get a one-way ticket to the underclass.
Now, on to topic No. 2: Rush Limbaugh is under fire for calling a 30-year-old woman who appeared on Capitol Hill a slut, and he should be.
It’s a terrible thing to say, and the fact that he reiterated his remarks the next day on his radio show says more about him than it does about her, even if you disagree with Sandra Fluke’s stance that religious groups’ health plans should cover contraception.
Conservatives have long deplored the coarsening of our culture and just because a conservative talk-show host says something offensive does not somehow make it OK. If you want to make a stand, you have to apply the rules equally to your side as well as your opponents’.
The same goes for those who are angry that liberal groups are pressuring Limbaugh’s advertisers to drop him. You can’t sing the praises of the free market (as I do) and then get upset when advertisers bail out after a host says something that causes a firestorm.
Having said that, the cries from offended liberals ring hollow when you consider the amount of invective left-wing darlings so often spew at their opponents — especially at conservative women.
MSNBC’s Ed Schultz called Laura Ingraham a “right-wing slut” and Bill Maher called Sarah Palin a word that can’t even be hinted at in a family newspaper. And in 2010, a well-known liberal website — www.wonkette.com — not only went after Palin in the most vile terms but also ridiculed her 3-year-old who has Down syndrome. Here’s the story, if you have the stomach for it: www.capitolreportnewmexico.com/?p=4160.
And right here in Santa Fe, this weekend a group calling itself “The Exhibitionist Theatre” is performing a play at the Lodge at Santa Fe called “How to Kill a Republikan.”
Satire or not, can you imagine the outcry that would come from the good people of the City Different if a play called “How to Kill an Occupy Protester” was staged by a right-wing playwright? There would be accusations of hate speech and condemnations of the hotel hosting such a performance.
But the play has produced nary a peep of protest.
If we’re sincere about cleaning up our country’s political discourse, we have to apply the rules equally — even if it means goring our own team’s ox.
Anything else is just hypocrisy.
(This column originally ran in the Santa Fe New Mexican on Sunday, March 11.)
