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The prevailing public view is that the Albuquerque Public Schools administration and school board couldn't screw in a light bulb without causing a complete blackout of the entire central Rio Grande Valley's power grid. I haven't seen any recent polling, but my guess is that APS would score somewhere between Dick Cheney and E. coli in terms of popularity these days.

Yeah, the jokes come fast and easy, especially with the district stumbling and bumbling its way toward selection of a new superintendent.

The school board's cowering decision to let Superintendent Beth Everitt out of her contract doesn't help, nor does the fact that quickly installed interim Superintendent Linda Sink was part of a reshuffle late last spring that left the district with an extra assistant superintendent: Linda Sink.

The episode doesn't do much to change public perception that the district lacks leadership, capitulates whenever the word "lawsuit" is mentioned, and is quick to circumvent its formal hiring process and turn it into some sort of smoke-filled-room deal.

Yeah, belittling APS makes fish-in-a-barrel look like solving a Rubik's Cube. But something else interesting came out of the entire Everitt denouement.

It came to our attention that Everitt's new employer — the Aiken County Schools in South Carolina — is just as screwed up as APS. In fact, it is so screwed up in Aiken that the district hired Everitt.

Test scores are awful in Aiken, dropout rates are astronomical, and the hiring process that led to Everitt evidently was full of acrimony, a void of leadership and possible lawsuits.

Hey, we resemble that remark! If you want to feel even better, go to Google.com and type in the terms "public," "schools" and "terrible." I get 462,000 hits. But more important, the first few pages of responses constitute a long, winding road trip of awfulness. Los Angeles public schools: horrible. Cleveland public schools: abysmal. Boston: You got it. Detroit: Do you even have to ask?

Interestingly, however, there is a disconnect between perception of public schools in general and people's regard for their own individual school districts.

For each of the past 39 years, the professional educator association Phi Delta Kappa has commissioned a Gallup poll gauging support for public schools. Believe it or not, the percentage of respondents giving their community's schools a failing grade has continued to be very, very low. In the 2007 survey, 45 percent gave schools a grade of "A" or "B," with only 5 percent responding "fail."

Also interesting, dismally so, is the percentage of turnout for school board elections. The last APS contest saw 6 percent of eligible voters make it to the polls. Six! What kind of mandate is 6 percent? What kind of candidates and leadership can we possibly expect with a turnout of 6 percent?

One almost gets the idea that school boards and districts were created as philosophical punching bags, formed and perpetuated to serve simply as ineffectual, spineless scapegoats for anyone with a complaint about education, learning and the unfairness of life.

Surely, something led to the APS administration and its school board being what it is today. Could we have only ourselves to blame — and do we actually, secretly, prefer our public school leadership to be ineffectual and spineless?