The assignments featured below demonstrate my ability to evaluate and improve communication structures within community-driven entities like schools and nonprofits by emphasizing ethical practices, stakeholder alignment, and transparency. They highlight my capacity to establish a workplace of shared understanding and accountability so that policies and values effectively serve diverse public service communities.
The paper focuses on an ethics audit of Uncommon Schools, a prominent urban charter school network in New York, New Jersey, and other neighboring states and examines both staff-facing and student-facing ethics infrastructures. An ethics audit is a systematic assessment of an organization's structures, practices, policies, and culture to determine whether its operations align with its stated ethical standards and principles. It evaluates the organization’s ability to promote and sustain ethical behavior across all levels, ensuring accountability and integrity in achieving its mission.
In this context, the ethics audit examines how the organizational structure of Uncommon Schools supports or hinders ethical practices in public education. It highlights communication as a key aspect of effective public service leadership, especially in public K-12 education. The audit underscores how Uncommon Schools communicates its values and ethical expectations to staff through clear systems such as coaching, training, and handbooks. However, student-facing communication falls short, as it lacks mechanisms for protecting students' rights and addressing unethical treatment. This paper demonstrates how, as a graduate of SPAA, I aim to communicate as a public service leader by identifying gaps in certain institutional systems and advocating for stronger, more transparent channels for feedback and accountability when implementing these systems, ensuring ethical practices are upheld across all levels of an organization. The paper also connects to my interest in organizational structure and human resource management by evaluating how leadership structures impact ethical behavior and staff management, influencing the educational experience of students.
Course: Introduction to Public Administration
Professor: Dr. Stephanie Newbold
One of the major themes of my Introduction to Public Administration course that influenced my thinking was the need for a clear mission statement and shared interpretation of policies across public administration. Drawing from Deborah Stone’s work, I found her argument that policy creation and implementation cannot exist without politics, and that different interpretations of an idea can significantly alter how policies are carried out, to be particularly insightful. Stone suggests that public administration works best when all actors involved have the opportunity to express their interpretations of a policy, leading to a shared and legitimate understanding of how that policy should be administered. In the context of public education, communication is paramount to ensuring that all stakeholders: students, teachers, administrators, parents, and community members have a shared understanding of the policies being implemented and the goals of the educational system.
