APS Supt Winston Brooks has a need to make APS "look good". He allocates nearly a million (classroom) dollars a year to APS public relations effort under the guise of "communications".
The Journal's conflicting obligation is to tell interest holders the (unvarnished) truth about the spending of public power and resources in public schools.
As it is essential to democracy, the obligation could hardly be more sacred.
Every month, Managing Editor Kent Walz and the Journal give Brooks an opportunity to evaluate his own administration and then report his impressions in print and without contradiction. It's an op-ed presented as news.
This month, Brooks examines his transparency and finds he is doing a great job.
His op-ed will be published on APS' award winning website; again, without opportunity for contradiction. (It was, link)
The Journal tacitly supports Brooks' claim that the amount of information he dumps is the measure of transparency. The real measure of transparency is; can you get to public information that he and they might want to hide? The answer is not a percentage. The answer is yes, or no.
If you ask Brooks, how much money did APS spend on an unjustifiable new board room, while students at Susie Rayos Marmon Elementary School were sitting in ancient and leaky portable classrooms, he won't tell you. If you ask him how much money they spent on that board room while at the same time they stopped doing fire safety inspections as a cost saving measure, he won't tell you.
You have a right to know, but he won't tell you. He won't tell you, not because you haven't the right to know, but because a candid, forthright and honest answer would make them all look self-serving at the expense of student best interests.
His actual, honest transparency grade is no, yet the Journal will allow him to create and maintain a contrary impression. They allow him to deliberately mislead stakeholders. They allow him eschew candor, forthrightness and honesty.
Kent Walz steadfastly refuses to put the board room question to Brooks. Just as he steadfastly refuses to ask him about the role modeling scandal in the leadership of the APS, or about the denial of due process to hundreds of whistle blowers, or about why they're hiding the Caswell Report on felony criminal misconduct in the leadership of the APS and its Police Department.
Yeah, I'd say Walz and Brooks are in cahoots; in league, collusion and conspiracy, to hide the inconvenient truth about the administration of the public interests in public schools.
What other explanation is there for the Journal's refusal to investigate and report upon credible allegations and evidence of an ethics and accountability crisis in the leadership of the APS?
photo and frame grab Mark Bralley
Tuesday, November 08, 2011
Is the Journal in cahoots with Brooks?
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4 comments:
And waht is with the lighted, computerized billboards, like near Del Norte (by the APS construction project incidentally)where Brooks toots his own horn and the Journal co-endorses it?
Those neon billboard ads must be extremely expensive.
Talk about transparency. HEre in an economicaqlly hard time, he's building a specialty branch of the school, and advertises "How great we are"in front of his Million-dollar specialty project.
Psychologically speaking, he really is a creepy kind of charactor.
My understanding is that the bill boards are privately owned and pay APS for space. In addition, APS gets a portion of the exposure on the bill board.
It's still in poor taste to put your self-styled bragging up in bright lights.
And Brook's is still wasting money by putting his mug & message up there. That spot could have collected revenue from another advertiser.
LAstly, what is the goal of the message?
In my observation, they feels there's a need to slow down the mounting public ire against their sorry selves.
More self-serving, imho, is Monica Armenta putting herself in the ads APS is running.
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