Brooks plan to"find inefficiency" in the APS is nonsense.

APS Supt Winston Brooks
has a plan, link, to find the
inefficiencies in the administration
of the APS;

"I’ve asked non-school department
directors to cut their budgets by an
additional 6.5 percent. This is a good
opportunity to re-evaluate the way
we operate and make some changes
to our structure. These changes may
help APS become a more efficient
organization." (emphasis added)

What "would help" the administration become a more efficient organization would be an impartial standards and accountability audit of the entire leadership of the APS; an independent review that reports to the public record.

There are people and organizations who make a living going in to bloated business management structures and pointing to the waste and inefficiencies. For a few tens of thousands of dollars, we could find out exactly who is taking home pay checks they aren't earning.

When the Council of the Great City Schools audited APS' administration recently, they concluded that;

APS administrative evaluations were subjective and
unrelated to promotion or step placement.

In other words, there is no objective evaluation of the conduct and competence of APS administrators. They promote people based on other than their skill sets. Consider the promotion of Michael Kimbrell, link, to APS' Director of Internal Audits; Brooks et al, did a such a poor job of vetting him, they ended up firing him within months of his promotion.

If Brooks' interest in finding inefficiencies were real, he would hire experts to find them. There is no good and ethical reason to not audit. His unwillingness to even discuss the idea of such an audit, openly, honestly, and on the record, points to his real interests; protecting good ol' boys from the earned consequences of their incompetence and corruption.

One of the greatest hurtles facing the leadership of the APS is restoring stakeholder confidence in their leadership. There is nothing that would be of more value in that regard, than an independent audit revealing that the administration of the APS is free of incompetence, corruption, and the practices that enable them.

The fact that the audit would
reveal quite the opposite, is the
real and only reason to not
commission the audit immediately,
despite Board Member Paula
Maes' insistence that,

she will never agree to any
audit that individually identifies
corrupt or incompetent
administrators or board members.

The 6.5% reductions will not include terminating the 6.5% of administrators who contribute the least to the education of this community's sons and daughters.

That ax will fall upon other necks.




photos Mark Bralley