Brooks headed for another contract extension this week

One of the responsibilities of the APS school board is to evaluate their superintendent every year.  I believe they will do it this week, though it isn't on any published agenda.  There are three meetings of the board scheduled for this week and not one agenda posted.

It is their record and their policy to post agendas at the last moment allowed by the law, link.   It serves no purpose but to discourage public participation in the meetings.

When board members evaluate their superintendent, they are also evaluating themselves.  If they determine that the superintendent is doing a good job; they simultaneously validate their selection and ongoing support of their superintendent.  It justifies their extending his contract by yet another year.

They have no choice but to determine he's doing great.  To determine otherwise, means they made a mistake in hiring and giving him exorbitant contract extensions.  If they determined the superintendent is doing a bad job, someone is sure to point out; hey, you hired him! it's your failure.

It's called creating the appearance of a conflict of interests.

Note that no other input is being sought or allowed.  There is no empirical data that he is doing a fine job at all.  No one has asked teachers, based on their accumulated 100,000 years of teaching experience, if they think he's doing a fine job.  It's all based on incestuous daisy chains of self-evaluations; everybody things everybody else is doing a fine job.

Superintendents should be impartially evaluated; they all should.  Recently, auditors from the Council of the Great City Schools, found APS' administrative evaluations were "subjective, and unrelated to promotions or step placement."   They found a good ol' boys club.

Even if the board were not conflicted in the evaluation process, they're not qualified to conduct one.  What does anyone one of them know about how APS really runs?  What is it about being elected by a majority of 3 or 4% of voters, that qualifies them to evaluate the administrative expertise of the 17th largest school district in the United States?

If  you ask the board to begin an independent audit of administrative standards and accountability, they would tell you its too expensive, too complex and too burdensome to undertake.  They, however, can sit together in secret for a few hours and produce its equivalent, no problem.

In two of the three meetings this week, they will decide that APS Supt Winston Brooks is doing a fine job;

• covering up felony criminal misconduct involving senior APS administrators, and
• denying due process to hundreds of whistleblower complaints of administrative corruption and incompetence, and
• covering up his, and their, abdication from their obligations as role models of student standards of conduct; the Pillars of Character Counts!. and
• employing a publicly funded private police force, a praetorian guard, to deny citizens free exercise of their Constitutionally protected human rights to speak freely and to petition the government.

They will decide that he has done such a fine job, they will increase the size of his already formidable golden parachute; they will extend his contract by yet another year.  They will vote to extend his contract beyond the ends of their own terms of election.  In the next meeting, likely the next day, they will vote again, and make it all legal.

The following day, the Journal editors may or may not whine about it, link, (there are other editorials decrying the process - their website search engine is nearly useless.)

They only get get away with this year after year, because the Journal and School Board President Paula Maes cronies in the broadcast media steadfastly refuse to investigate and report upon corruption and incompetence in the senior administration and board,

thereby depressing voter turnout to ridiculously inadequate levels.