Are the standards of conduct and competence that apply to APS school board members and administrators, high enough to protect public interests and resources from incompetence and corruption?
Is accountability to those standards swift and certain?
Are there venues in the APS where a complaint filed against an administrator or board member, is guaranteed due process?
In fact,there is no due process for complaints naming administrators and board members.
If there were, it would be easy for any board member, any administrator, any one of their lawyers, or any one of their lawyers' lawyers, to just point to it; the venue where there is honest to God due process for complaints made against senior administrators and board members. How does their publicly funded private police force get to be the only investigators of their own felony misconduct?
If they provide any venue at all, where the adjudication of complaints against administrators and board members is free from blatant conflicts of interest, why won't they point to it?
It is curious that they won't.
It is more than curious that they won't.
Curiouser still, the Journal's steadfast refusal to investigate and report upon the ethics and accountability scandal in the leadership of the APS.
The first legitimate use of power is to defend it from abuse;
to provide transparent accountability its exercise.
The primary accoutrement of power, the most powerfully corrupting, is the increasing lack of honest accountability to meaningful standards of conduct and competence.
It corrupts absolutely.
If you're powerful enough, or believe you're powerful enough,
you don't have to respond to legitimate questions about the
public interests and your public service; you can ignore them,
you can stonewall them.
- Why won't they produce ethically redacted public records of at least three investigations into felony criminal misconduct by senior APS administrators?
- Why are they denying due process to hundreds of APS whistle blower complaints?
- Why won't they produce a candid, forthright and honest accounting of their spending at 6400 Uptown Blvd?
Government of, by and for the people entitles the people to transparent accountability in the administration of their power and resources. Transparent accountability begins with transparency; transparency of the sort found in the standards they established and enforce upon students; "candid, forthright, and honest"
Cultures of corruption and incompetence rest upon foundations of inadequate standards and/or insufficient accountability to such standards as there are.
It is a shame that an election of a majority school board members and the entrusting of control over nearly a third of a billion of our dollars, there will be no discourse on standards and accountability in the leadership of the APS.
No one of them is ever going to have to explain why, or even admit that, there are two standards of conduct in the APS, one for students, one for board members and administrators. No one of them will have to stand up in public and declare their allegiance to the law, or to a nationally recognized, accepted and respected code of ethical conduct; the student standards of conduct.
No one of them has ever said, no one of them will say;
Within my public service, for the few hours a day I hold control over the people's power and resources, I will hold myself honestly accountable, by means of a mechanism over which I have no undue influence and powerful enough to hold me accountable even against my will, to meaningful standards of conduct and competence. And,
In no case shall my own standards of conduct
be lower than the standards of conduct for students.
... or any words to that effect.
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