EDITORIAL: The Ann Arbor Public Schools & Transparency

Saline, Michigan public school Superintendent Scot Graden has been blogging about his job, public education and a variety of other education-related issues since 2007.  In 2009, writer Mark Stock published a piece in The School Administrator, the official publication of The School Superintendents Association titled “Superintendents’ Blogs Worth Checking.”

In September 2013, Ann Arbor Superintendent Jeanice Kerr Swift launched her own blog, as did AAPS Board of Education President Deb Mexicotte. Both blogs are hosted by the AAPS.

After two years of Dr. Patricia Green whose idea of transparency included telling parents that any public records they wanted could be obtained using Freedom of Information Act  requests, the new blogs are a step in the right direction. Kerr Swift writes in her third entry, “Top-performing organizations are characterized by their willingness to seek input and their effectiveness in leveraging feedback to improve processes and outcomes. Successful teams prioritize what they hear from their ‘customers’ to improve their work; they specialize in continuous improvement of service to stakeholders.” Amen to that.

In addition, Kerr Swift has been hosting a series of Superintendent Community Forums. She is on a “listening tour,” and the Superintendent is getting an earful. Parents have voiced concerns about large class sizes, the prospect of redistricting, fees and budget cuts.

We hope that as Kerr Swift settles in to her job, her blog posts will do a better job of communicating AAPS initiatives, accomplishments, challenges and, yes, especially the disappointments. In short, our hope is that the Superintendent’s blog entries become  honest assessments, because under the administration of Dr. Patricia Green Ann Arbor parents and taxpayers were too frequently subjected to heaping portions of political spin—starting with Dr. Green’s promise to eliminate our district’s decades-old achievement gap and ending with a sudden unexplained urge to retire mid-contract.

The blog written by Board of Education President Deb Mexicotte, while also a welcome gesture of openness, is a disappointment. Ms. Mexicotte, whose letter to parents after the sudden “retirement” of Dr. Green, was little more than an effort to justify the BOE’s decision to hire Dr. Green, uses her blog to complain about what she refers to as “the media climate.” She writes, “I have come to realize that we share a widespread frustration with the level of both accuracy and civility that has pervaded our public discourse…While we expect (and demand) the very best effort and accountability from our public servants and dedicated staff, no one can do their best work when constantly needing to address misinformation, unfounded rumors, endless suspicion and personal attacks – especially by those who typically have no public accountability….”

Her answer to this problem? “My approach to date has been to mostly try to ignore the most confounding of these distractions from our work. But I have decided I can do more to support those voices of hope and reason and constructive criticism by adding my voice to articulate regularly and in narrative form that which I previously have thought was reported well enough in media articles….”

Ms. Mexicotte has gone from ignoring feedback to talking over it. Worse still, she undermines the efforts of Superintendent Kerr Swift who obviously wants to send the message that “successful teams prioritize what they hear from their ‘customers’ to improve their work; they specialize in continuous improvement of service to stakeholders.”

We congratulate the AAPS for enhancing communication between the Superintendent, the BOE President and the “customers” whom they serve. We urge AAPS stakeholders to read the blogs and engage in thoughtful, civil discussions. We’ll be reading the two blogs, and we believe that the majority of AAPS officials understand that public accountability applies to public officials. We’ll also remind our Superintendent and Ms. Mexicotte and that “misinformation, unfounded rumors, and endless suspicions” often stem from poor institutional transparency.