That which is wrong with the leadership of the APS

… is a historical failure to hold powerful people accountable for their corruption and or incompetence. In this context, the persistent permission of incompetence is corrupt.

From its very beginning, the leadership of the APS has been a good ol’ boys club. An audit by the Council of the Great City Schools found; administrative evaluations are subjective and unrelated to promotion or step placement.

John Dalberg-Acton argued; “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

With all due respect Lord Acton, it is not power that corrupts. It is the opportunity to abuse power without consequence that corrupts, absolutely.

There a few consequences, if any, for APS school board members and senior administrators. They hide behind denial of due process for complaints filed against them. Internally, conflicts of interest dominate complaint processes.

Externally, they hide behind an eloquence of lawyers, litigation and legal weaselry. The District, read; taxpayers, are paying increased insurance premiums to its insurer as the direct result of the amount of money they are funneling from the operational fund to the coffers of local law firms.

They are underwriting cost-is-no-object legal defenses.
They are buying “admissions of no guilt” despite their actual guilt.

Their record cannot stand investigation.

Fortunately for them, the Journal will not investigate them.

The opportunity for powerful people to abuse power without consequence stems in no small part from their community. Powerful people at the Journal will protect powerful people in the leadership of the APS. That’s what powerful people do for each other.

This is not to say that the Journal approves per se of these specific abuses of power by the leadership of the APS;

1. the failure to establish high enough standards of conduct and competence,

2. the failure to hold themselves honestly accountable to those, or even to the law, and

3. their fundamental failure to protect from their abuse, the power and resources that the people have entrusted to their stewardship. The first responsible use of power being; to ensure that their power cannot be abused without consequence.

The Journal is not defending the abuses of power by the leadership of the APS. You don’t see editorials defending the lack of due process for complaints filed against board members and senior administrators.

Rather, the Journal is acting in defense of the arrangement; the good ol’ boy system; powerful people having each other’s back in the fight to avoid exposure of systems that allow powerful people to continue abuse power without consequence.