APS leadership inconspicuous on leadership

If you ask the senior most executive role model of APS' student standards of conduct, School Board President Marty Esquivel if he is a role model for students and staff, he will tell you no.  He is not, he once said to me, because he is not an educator.

APS Supt Winston Brooks will not tell you why he is not a role model of honest accountability to the same standards of conduct he enforces upon students.  He will stonewall the question.

The scandal hinges on the meaning of the word "accountable".  To people like Esquivel and Brooks, that means you stand up some where, some time and tell people you are "accountable" to the "highest standards" of conduct and competence.

Those who go looking for the place where a complaint can be filed against them over failure to meet actual standards, and where that complaint will see due process; find a system crippled by the appearances of conflicts of interest and impropriety.

"Honestly accountable" means accountable under a system over which you have no undue influence, and powerful enough to hold you accountable, even against your will.  Accountability in the APS, their whistle blower program; Ethical Advocate for one, means subordinates and colleagues hold superior administrators and board members accountable for their conduct and competence.

Take for example the money that Brooks and Esquivel are spending on their legal defense against complaints over manifest civil rights violations.

They report on their spending to the Director of Risk Management and a Claim Analyst. Subordinates are signing off on the amount of money they're spending and on what. They are signing off on litigation against the public interests and on behalf of the personal interests of the defendants.

Subordinate oversight is oxymoronic.

So far, they have managed to avoid the standard "case analysis" presentation to the rest of the board. The rest of the board still enjoys plausible deniability with respect to knowing how operational dollars are being squandered. It is their responsibility to the people to insist upon a presentation of case analyses.

Take as another example, their refusal to model honest accountability to the Pillars of Character Counts!; a nationally recognized, accepted and respected code of ethics, and more importantly, APS' student standards of conduct.

This is neither the time or place to argue about the suitability of the Pillars as standards for students and their adult role models.  The time and place was a school board meeting nearly twenty years ago when the board unanimously adopted the Pillars as the student standards.  They still, as a matter of school board policy, require students to "model and promote the Pillars of Character Counts!"

Upon the declaration of that expectation, they don the mantelets of role models of honest accountability to the Pillars of Character Counts!  It doesn't make one whit of difference if they agree or not; they are the senior most role models of the standards of conduct they establish and enforce upon students.

The board sees their choices as two;

1. establish accountability to standards of conduct to which they have no interest in being held actually, honestly accountable; even for those hours a day they hold students accountable, or
   
2. ignore the issue. 

And by ignore, I mean spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and a great deal of influence on keeping the establishment media from reporting the truth about the ethics and accountability scandal in the leadership of the APS.  Their choice; self evident.

The board has two honorable choices; the one considerably more honorable than the other;

1. hold themselves honestly accountable to student standards of conduct; "more than the law requires and less than the law allows", or
   
2. lower student standards to standards low enough that the "leadership" are finally comfortable being held accountable to them.  Their current standards; if it's legal its alright; the lowest standards of conduct acceptable among civilized human beings.

Your choices number two;

1. do something or
   
2. don't

Most people, when they say somebody should do something, they mean somebody-else should do something.  Waiting for the perfect circumstances to stand up and fight, guarantees only that you will never stand up and fight.

Remember the words of Edmund Burke;

All that is necessary for evil to prevail in the world,
is for good men to do nothing.

I'm not saying Brooks and Esquivel are evil (or not), but the leadership of the APS who will not hold themselves honestly accountable as role models of APS student standard of conduct are kind of people Burke was writing about, and you are the people he was writing to.

Required reading for this exercise; the Aspen Declaration, link, the basis for the Board's adoption of Character Counts!, and the resolution, link, they passed unanimously adopting the Pillars of Character Counts! as APS' student standards of conduct.