Brooks eval bungled

One could argue that there is no single person more important than Supt Winston Brooks in determining the success or failure of APS effort to educate nearly 90,000 children.

One could argue that the APS Board of Education engages in no more important endeavor than selecting the best superintendent.  And that their second most important endeavor is their annual evaluation of his performance.

Every year, the board is required to evaluate the superintendent, and by logical extension, their competence in his selection.  It is a self evaluation as well.  Not only are they evaluating their competence in his selection, but their continued endorsement over the years while inflating his golden parachute to an all time high of three quarters of a million dollars.

It creates the appearance of a conflict of interests;
their duty to evaluate their superintendent impartially
and their interests in protecting their own reputations.
Their relentless refusal to even acknowledge the existence
of the conflict suggests that they are not handling it well.

That they carry no objective data into the evaluation; that it is all subjective and unquantifiable is profoundly disturbing.  One need look no further than their continued  refusal to survey teachers and include their input in their annual evaluation.

There aren't many good and ethical reasons to hide the truth from stakeholders.  There is not one good and ethical reason that doesn't require defense or at the very least, acknowledgement.

If the APS Board of Education had even one good and ethical reason to conduct this entire process in meetings in secret, meetings they choose to not record, why not defend it?

Why not defend their deliberate refusal to record their meetings, to create an incontrovertible record?  Why not create a record that would be available only to a judge?  Except that they don't want to create a record that would be available to a judge, because in their meetings in secret, they routinely violate the law.

It is proof positive of their individual and collective unwillingness to be held accountable even to the law, much less the higher standards of conduct they hold up for students. 

If the school board could justify their position; the entire process,
stem to stern, cloaked in a blanket of secrecy, the Journal would
publish it.  You know they would.

The board hasn't offered a justification.  And the Journal hasn't asked for one.  That, or the Journal for some reason known only to them, won't report what is that justification.

If nothing else, the board could publish their defense on their award winning website.  APS' million dollar a year public relations effort could be put use telling truth; the whole truth and nothing but the ethically redacted truth about the board's process and product.  They won't do that either.

There is really in the end, only one reason for them to hide the truth beyond the requirements of the law; and that is to escape the consequences of the truth being known.

Trust me, they are not trying to escape the accolades
that truth telling would evoke.