Brooks' Disingenuous Data Dump

APS' hero of transparency Supt Winston Brooks will bask today in the warm glow of Journal coverage of a supposed data roll out, link. (I say supposed, because at the time of this writing; the link to APS salaries doesn't actually lead to them.)

Update; the salary schedule made it up on APS' award winning website at approximately 9:30 am. link

If you are like most people with more than a passing interest in public schools, you will probably look up a few salaries; Winston Brooks', Monica Armenta's, and perhaps your child's teacher.

Of the 11,500 discreet bits of information in the data dump, you may be interested in three.

Brooks and the Journal aren't pointing dump's actually useful percentage rate of .0026%. They would rather you focus on the haystack and not upon the needles which may, or may not be buried deep inside it.

If APS were transparent, you could search for a needle; the cost of the board member chairs in the new board room; did they really pay $800 dollars apiece for chairs that they sit in twice a month for an hour or two?

If APS were transparent, you could look up the cost of the board room itself; a still completely unjustified major expenditure; somewhere around a million dollars, at a time when students were still being educated in dilapidated portable classrooms, and when APS, as a cost saving measure, stopped doing fire safety inspections of schools, link.

The true measure of transparency is the facility with which every last bit of public information can be secured; anything else is just a smoke and mirrors.

Brooks managed to get in his parting shot at charter schools; sicking the Journal on them for not beating APS to the punch in the roll out of largely useless employee salaries.

If they are at all recalcitrant in joining the stampede; expect Brooks and the Journal to get very worked up over it.




photo Mark Bralley