Korte off on a rant

Journal Managing Editor Kent Walz has given School Board Member Kathy Korte the opportunity to pen a guest column, link.

Korte is upset by funding inadequacies and critics.

She has her own ideas about why APS is failing half its students. Among them, truancy. Her solution to truancy; compulsory attendance through graduation. It illustrates her conviction, in the face of conventional wisdom, that horses actually can be brought to water and made to drink, even against their will.

There are a whole set of problems that cripple APS performance, problems that no one ever talks about. For example; student discipline problems.

Korte won't talk about student discipline; none of them will. Either because she and they don't think it's a problem, or because she and they don't want to talk about it. Its an example of what School Board Member Lorenzo Garcia called, a "hard to have" discussion.

We don't talk about student discipline and chronically disruptive students, link, because the efficient and effective enforcement of discipline policies is an executive responsibility and an administrative function and failure. They're in hiding.

They're hiding their record. Even if Korte and the rest were willing to talk about discipline problems, they couldn't talk facts because adequate records weren't kept; there is no longitudinal record on their website.

The woeful record they do have, isn't credible. Auditors from the Council of the Great City Schools found that administrators routinely falsified crime statistics to protect the reputations of their schools.

The board won't have the administration prepare a PowerPoint for interest holders, on Student Discipline, standards and accountability because the presentation, if honest, would be embarrassing. If it weren't embarrassing, or worse, it wouldn't be hidden; it would be published on their award winning website.

The only defense of an indefensible position, is to hide it.
Hiding problems complicates their solution.

A major problem, student discipline and chronically disruptive students, remains unaddressed because the board doesn't want to have a hard to have discussion.

It requires a great deal of character and courage to have the hard to have discussions; that's why they're hard to have.

If there is the character, and if there is the courage to have the hard to have discussions, why aren't we having them? Why aren't any being planned?

Speaking of which, what happened to the community meetings on bullying (and student discipline problems), that were promised by APS and the Journal, link? Was I right, link, about their unwillingness to be candid, forthright and honest with interest holders?

The Citizens Advisory Council on Communication offered to help create a venue for hard to have discussions. Korte shut them down summarily. They have yet to see due process for a petition carrying more than 100 of their signatures. She stands foursquare in opposition to the Citizens Advisory Council on Communication and their effort to find a venue where there can be open and honest two-way communication about student discipline, and other public interests, between the leadership of the APS and the community members they serve.

If Korte and the board have the character and the courage to have the hard to have discussions, they have to prove it; they have to have the hard to have discussions. That or explain to our satisfaction, their good and ethical reason to not have them.

Why can't we expect to have the hard to have discussions about why half of APS students are failing? except that the leadership of the APS cannot summon the character and the courage to show up and participate?




photo Mark Bralley