Governmental transparency is about what you can't see, not about what you can.

I recently heard someone extolling APS' recent success in providing transparency.   I was compelled to object; the leadership of the APS is opaque as it ever was; the truth they want to hide, is just as hard to find as it ever was. Their apparent transparency is a smoke screen, a data dump, a deluge of nearly useless information.

If you asked APS School Board Member Marty Esquivel,
APS Supt Winston Brooks, or Journal Editor Kent Walz,
if APS is "transparent" they would answer in unison;

Yes it is, just look at all the information posted on their APS' award winning website.

APS is big in every respect. Information about the administration of public power and resources is correspondingly large. The sheer number of public records generated gives the leadership of the APS a unique opportunity to publish huge amounts of information. It is very effective camouflage for their fundamental lack of honest transparency.

Their success lies in convincing the people that the total weight of the records they publish is the real measure of their transparency, the more records they publish, regardless of the of the record in holding politicians and public servants accountable in their public service, the more transparent they appear.

Transparency, like all forms of truthtelling, is as much about what isn't said or written, as it is about what is; maybe more.

The leadership of APS and Kent Walz would have stakeholders believe  that APS is transparent because you can find any employee's salary on their website.  So what?  Really, so what?

The true measure of APS' transparency is what you should be able to find on their website and cannot;

1. the findings of any audit whose findings include incompetence or corruption in the leadership of the APS, or


2. a candid, forthright and honest accounting of spending at 6400 Uptown Blvd, or


3. any information about the millions of dollars APS has settled on complainants over administrative or executive corruption and incompetence, or


4. information on the millions of dollars paid to the Modrall law firm, cost being no object-unlimited operational funds to use-  to litigate exception to the law for the leadership of the APS, and immunity for their incompetence and corruption, or


5. statistics about student discipline and the effects of chronically disruptive students, or


6. anything else you can think of, where the truth looks worse than the hiding of it.

Transparent my ass.