Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus of Education, The University of British Columbia
[permission granted to reproduce if authorship acknowledged]
Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) wants to abolish Quebec’s school boards. Nova Scotia abolished its boards in 2018. Who’s next?
Many people elected as school trustees or
school commissioners come to the position without understanding or accepting
their role as governors of the board in the public interest. This has led some,
including provincial governments, to question the value of school boards.
A report on the dysfunction of the English
Montreal School Board (EMSB) described as ‘scathing’ and ‘blistering’ provides
additional support for the abolition of school boards to the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government. Global
News quotes the report as saying:
A poor
understanding of the roles of commissioners and managers, the politicization of
issues and the leadership gaps of the various actors involved in positions of
responsibility have contributed to the establishment of dysfunctional
governance.
So, what is the value
of a properly functioning school board?
Boards of school
trustees can play a pivotal role in translating the public’s views of, and
aspirations for, public education into goals and objectives for the school
systems they govern. They explain the educational system to the public, respond
to the community’s view of schooling, and advocate on behalf of the systems they
govern.
School boards’ most
important tasks are: articulating the goals and objectives of the jurisdiction;
expressing the goals in policy; establishing criteria for determining whether
those goals and objectives are being achieved through the policies set;
assuring that staff collect relevant evidence and appraising that evidence;
providing feedback to the public about how well the system is doing; recruiting
and selecting their only employee - the Superintendent or Director of Education
and holding that individual to account for the achievement of the goals and
objectives expressed in the Board’s policies.
School boards exist
to represent the needs of all citizens and to serve their interests. School
Board governance is predicated on the division of responsibility between
elected politicians and a permanent, professional civil service. School boards
have a role (governance – the “what”) distinct from the role of staff
(operations – the “how”).
The English Montreal School Board
(EMSB) is just the most recent instance of school board dysfunction. Its
visibility arises, in part, from its location in a major media centre. School
boards in other major media centres have received similar negative attention,
including Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary. Instances of school board members not
respecting the separation between governance and administration is pervasive.
School boards are a buffer between provincial
governments and citizens with desires that the provincial governments cannot or
will not fulfil. Provincial governments can point to school boards as the decision-makers
about how funds are allocated. Nonetheless, school boards have always been an
irritant to provincial governments.
The conflict between provincial
governments and local school boards are as old as Canada itself. In fact,
older. As early as 1846, Egerton Ryerson, the Methodist minister who had
advocated so vigorously for free, universal schooling, was arguing with equal
vigor for a strong central educational authority vested in the hands of
government. He said, “If it is the Master which makes the School, it is
Government that makes the system. What the Master is to the one, the Government
is to the other – the director, the animating spirit of it.”
Ryerson was worried about what he called
the “isolated, independent, democracies” that were
administering education. Ryerson was concerned that local school boards might
misappropriate the monies allocated for education to some other purpose. “If it
is the duty of Government to legislate on the subject of Public Instruction,”
Ryerson said, “it must be its duty to see its laws executed.”
The British North America Act
(1867) gave the provinces the sole responsibility for making laws about
education. The provinces, in turn, created strong centralized departments of
education to oversee school boards.
Ryerson’s concern about school
trustees’ use of funds was justified. The Depression created financial havoc
for many Canadian school boards and jeopardized local governance. Citizens
whose school taxes were in arrears were ineligible for election, which often
made it difficult to find eligible people willing to stand for office. This in
turn made it hard to elect local school boards. Provincial governments were
often forced to appoint an official trustee to administer the affairs of the
local district. British Columbia was typical of the situation prevailing
throughout Canada. In 1934–35, only 182 of the province’s 752 school districts
had official trustees. In the following ten years, the province reduced the
number of school boards. By 1944–45, when there were 525 school districts, 204
of them were administered by an official trustee. Today there are 60 school
boards that, even in the last decade, have occasionally required administration
by an official trustee in place of the elected board.
The steady decline in the number of
school boards is mirrored in almost every province and, depending upon the
resolve of the Coalition Avenir Québec, they may disappear completely in Quebec. But school boards will
have a better chance of surviving if they understand and practice the
separation of governance from administration.
