"Albuquerque Public Schools: Support the Potential"

hawks APS' Executive Director of Communications Monica Armenta.

The radio and TV campaign is underwritten by the APS Foundation and Paula Maes' New Mexico Broadcasters Association.

Armenta's fans will be overjoyed to hear her voice in APS' latest effort to improve their public image. Her voice follows the testimony of a number of successful graduates of the APS, by suggesting a need to "support the potential".

Let's examine APS' potential.

In the first place, we can assume the potential she is talking about is potential for something good; increased success in educating nearly 90,000 of this community's sons and daughters.

In this context potential means that it is;

feasible, likely, obtainable, possible, probable, reachable, realizable, conceivable, imaginable, plausible, thinkable, undeveloped, and

within realm of possibility,

that the leadership of the APS will be able to substantially improve their performance.

They have had, literally, more than one hundred years to put in place, an administration that was capable of more than mediocre performance. They have failed.

Honestly, what is the likelihood that they will do substantially better next year than this, and better still the year after that? These are the same people after all, who just told us how excited they were to be doing no worse than anyone else.

They are crippled in any effort to improve by their steadfast unwillingness to be hold themselves honestly accountable to meaningful standards of conduct and competence within their public service.

Even that thought, would not address the fundamental flaw with APS, the one that has held it back for more than a century; the mistaken belief that eight people know more about education than the teachers who are actually doing it.

The old saw about no one of us being smarter than all of us, is completely lost on oligarchs bent on acquiring power.

That isn't going to change, and APS is never going to be substantially better.

There is in fact, no potential to support.
The thing to support is a whole new leadership.




photo Mark Bralley