APS Superintendent Search; the need for secret candidates

The leadership of the APS is trying to add more secrecy to their search for a new superintendent. They want to keep secret, the names of people who want to be considered in their selection of APS’ new superintendent. They argue; a better field of candidates will emerge if they are allowed to apply without telling the people around them what they are doing.

It is fair to ask, better for whom exactly?

Consider for a moment, the field of candidates who will apply, but only if they can do so in secret from people who trust them.

Their only defining characteristic; the only thing that makes them different from otherwise willing candidates, is their manifest willingness to betray the trust of stake and interest holders in order to advance their own interests.

The fundamental question of course; why would the leadership of the APS be looking for a superintendent with a proven record of their willingness to betray the trust of stake and interest holders; except to help them cover up their own betrayal of trust of stake and interest holders?

The leadership of the APS does not want the truth to be known about executive and administrative ethics, standards and accountability. Are they looking for a superintendent willing to keep secrets?
They refuse to discuss in an open and honest public meeting;

• double standards of conduct in the APS resulting from the board’s unanimous abdication of their obligations as the senior-most role models in the district, of honest accountability to the same standards of conduct that they establish and then have enforced upon students, 

• their wanton spending of the operational fund on cost-is-no-object legal defenses for school board members and senior administrators, in order to buy for them in unjustifiably expensive settlements, admissions of “no guilt”, regardless of guilt. The effect of which is, they arguably unaccountable even to the law.

And finally one is compelled to ask about this editorial, if the editors are really so honestly outraged about the APS school board’s effort to keep more secrets, why are they so unwilling to investigate and report upon why the board’s very existence depends on increasingly more secrecy?

Can they really not connect the dots?

Or are there other interests at play?