There was an article this morning in the Journal, link. It had to do with how happy everybody is about librarians and assistant principals filling in for the teachers that APS did not hire in time for the beginning of classes. I'm guessing that the reporter did not interview many librarians or assistant principals.
I availed myself of the opportunity to post a comment on the story;
This reporter/the Journal need to do a little investigating before passing along APS press releases. This is not investigative reporting. It isn't even honest.
The truth is no harder to find than interviewing teachers who have left APS, and those who dream of leaving. Certainly there is some upset over standardized testing and teacher evals, but that isn't the whole story.
APS doesn't do exit interviews (I am supposing) because they anticipate results they won't like.
As but one example, they will find a number of teachers left and are leaving APS because of out of control students and classrooms; in particular an administrative failure to protect teachers and other students from chronically disruptive students. Anyone who doesn't believe this, simply needs to substitute teach for one day. If you don't think students are control in schools, go to any high school and see how many students are "sagging" in blatant violation of school board policy. This isn't about sagging, it is about the permission of prohibited behavior and the effects that has on educationally efficient environments.
Alternatively, drive by any high school and see how many students are "sagging" in blatant violation of school board policy. (This isn't about sagging; it is about the (overt or tacit) executive and administrative "permission of prohibited behavior" and the negative effects that has on educationally efficient environments.)
Enforcing the district's discipline policy is an administrative responsibility and one can see why APS administrators and the board don't ever talk about student discipline. And, why they don't and won't collect any data that exposes the failure to keep schools under the control of adults.
APS does not have a "discipline philosophy". Go ahead, search their award winning website; nowhere will you find any philosophy upon which they base their feckless and often conflicting discipline policies. The "leadership" of the APS cannot even agree whether to "punish" or even keep longitudinal records of deliberate misconduct.
APS cannot show you historical data on student discipline. A recent audit (by the Council of the Great City Schools) found administrators routinely falsifying crime statistics to protect the reputations of their schools.
They maintain a PUBLICLY FUNDED PRIVATE POLICE FORCE in order to keep a lid on the truth, in particular the truth about school board members and senior administrators who break the law. It's why, when former APS police chief Gil Lovato was canned, his lawyer Sam Bregman said, "if they ever get to court (to tell the truth about the cover ups), there won't be a single APS senior administrator left standing".
Sussing the Journal's steadfast refusal to dig any deeper into issues than the news releases that Monica Armenta hands them, is as easy as it is obvious; they are part of APS' cover up of an ethics, standards and accountability crisis in the highest levels of leadership.
That or what else, exactly?
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