Brooks listens to teachers, or not.

APS Supt Winston Brooks spent Monday afternoon, link, listening to teachers - 20 of them.

He has had formed, a SuperTAC; a Superintendent's Teacher Advisory Council.

No indication is given, on how or by whom the relative handful of teachers were selected to represent every other teacher in the APS.

The SuperTAC follows, give or take a year or two, on the heels of the SuperSAC; the Superintendents' Student Advisory Council.  Teachers should not lose sight of the fact that the SuperTAC does in fact follow the solicitation of advice from every other stakeholder group.  Dead last.  Don't think that doesn't mean something.

Beyond that, key to understanding what is going on, is the word advisory.  Brooks has no intention to allow teachers to decide anything.  Despite their combined 100,000 years of ongoing APS teaching experience, teachers still have no seat at the table where decisions are being made.

They will sit instead at a table where their "advice" will be sought.

Which begs a fair question;

Should teachers have any control over the destiny of public education?  Should they have a seat at the table where decisions are made?

That they now have absolutely no seat at the table,
is manifest in the fact they have no voice.
Winston Brooks will not allow teachers, every last one of them,  to be surveyed on any substantive issue; student discipline and chronically disruptive students, for one.

Brooks will not allow any opportunity for teachers to respond candidly, forthrightly, honestly and without fear of retaliation, to legitimate questions about the failure in schools.

He gets away with it, because he has friends in the "media", not the least of whom is Journal Managing Editor Kent Walz.

Walz will not survey teachers either.

What he will do, is to publish a letter from former school board heavy hitter, Paula Maes.

The letter, link, as you may imagine, gave Brooks high praise.

The title, written by an editor, gave even higher praise, it read;

Brooks has earned an A as APS Chief.

If teachers were surveyed, Brooks would not earn an A.

If Brooks thought for a moment, that he would earn an A,
he would be falling all over himself to have a survey done.

If Walz thought a survey of teachers would cast the leadership of the APS in a good light, he would be surveying teachers in a heartbeat.

Brooks won't, a survey wouldn't, and teachers will continue to take the heat for institutional and systemic failure over which they have no control.




photos Mark Bralley