Friday, May 4, 2012

“We never met an initiative we didn’t like”

A long chat with Erroll Davis about APS and the cheating mess: “Only so many ways to perfume a pig.” | Get Schooled [ajc]
He said that he and his team have found 211 ongoing initiatives under way in APS with no one taking any account of whether the initiatives were doing any good.
APS partnered with all sorts of folks who announced that they had a $2 million grant ready to go if only the district kicked in $500,000 to make it happen, he said.
“We never met an initiative we didn’t like,” he said. APS opened its doors to everyone who claimed, “I am here and I want to help. We had 1,000 points of light, and no outcomes.”
So many commenters seem to think that Davis sounds just like Hall before him. I disagree. Hall claimed everything was going just fine, everything's looking up, the future's so bright etc. Davis has made no secret of the fact that the system was broken when he got it, and he's trying to fix it.

I'm sure there was at least one person at APS "taking account" of each initiative: The one whose wallet was benefitting by it. I'm equally sure that no one was verifying whether the initiatives were doing the children any good. Usually, people who spend that kind of money want to know what they bought: The apparent lack of outrage from these outside agencies says to me that they know what they bought. Many, if not most, of these "initiatives" were little better than money-laundering adventures.

Hall, her deputies and the SRT directors "knew or should have known"! That's where the real story is going to be here.

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