"Nepotism Is No Problem at Charter School"

Thus read the headline in a Journal report this morning, link.

I would suggest that the whole point of the report was to get people to think there is in fact, a problem with nepotism in charter schools. If there is no problem, why write the story at all; why put it on the front page? Since when does the unstory get front page coverage?

Recently, auditors from the Council of the Great City Schools revealed that there were real problems with nepotism in the administration of the APS. Did the Journal report that? No. Did they do any kind of investigation of their own? No.

Yet they're are willing to point to the possibility that there is a problem in charters even though they conclude, in the end, that there is not.

The leadership of the APS needs to get used to the fact that the void they are leaving in the education of 90,000 of this community's sons and daughters is going to be filled by charter schools. And further that, the charters are going to do a better job of it because they are not locked into the rigid thinking that keeps APS using a model that no longer works.

They need to call off their cronies at the Journal, and allow them to write uplifting stories about charter school successes rather than having them write stories whose point is to try to make the second horse in the race; APS, look like the winner.

We're paying Monica Armenta and her crew a million dollars* a year to do that.

*The real cost of the APS Communications Department is unknown except to the leadership of the APS. If you search the APS website for "communications department budget" you get no answer.