Who really cares about school board elections?

Who really cares about school board elections?

Charles Ungerleider

Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[Permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged] 

Although sometimes fiercely competitive among the candidates, school board elections receive little attention from eligible voters. Political scientists R. Michael McGregor and Jack Lucas open their 2019 article about the correlates of school board voter turnout with the declaration: “If turnout is an indication of public engagement in an election, then most Canadians are distinctly disengaged from school board politics.”[i] Ouch!

            It seems likely that citizen disengagement has at least two negative consequences. One is that disinterest in school board politics means that school trustees are not accountable for the decisions they make, except to the narrow constituency from which they draw their support. The second is that the lack of accountability to local electors leaves provincial governments as the main agencies holding school boards accountable.

            Infrequently and typically with reluctance, a school board is ‘fired,’ and an official trustee appointed in its place. When Vancouver School Board Trustees failed to approve a budget under guidelines the Ministry of Education had set, the Board was dismissed, and an official trustee appointed for the school district. The trustees who had been dismissed petitioned the court saying, among other things, their rights to liberty and equal protection of the law as enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms had been infringed.

The court disagreed. In its ruling, the court ruled that the trustees had “no status to bring the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to their aid” because only individuals were accorded rights by the Charter. “Creatures of statute like a school board” or “members of a board acting in their official capacity” had no such rights. “Even if they had a constitutionally protected liberty to be school trustees, they had no absolute right, and lost their status when they failed to comply with a constitutionally valid statutory requirement.”[ii]

Ten years later, an Alberta court rejected an argument by the Alberta School Boards Association that reforms introduced by the government “. . . violated their right of reasonable autonomy which extended to elections, recruitment, management and fiscal control.” In part of its judgment, the court ruled that “. . . school boards did not have an expressed or implied constitutional right to reasonable autonomy,” possessing only “rights and powers delegated to them by the province.”[iii]

In other words, although they may have been democratically elected, school boards and the individual elected as trustees have only the standing and authority granted to them under provincial legislation.  This was evident when Nova Scotia eliminated its seven elected school boards, replacing them with a provincial advisory council on education whose 12 members are government appointees. As was the case in Vancouver and Alberta, there were those who considered the change undemocratic. Professor emeritus Wayne MacKay, an expert on educational law and constitutional matters observed:

[It’s a] lesson in how important and powerful the provincial government is in relation to education. School boards are simply a delegate of the province and they can create them, they can take them away.

McGregor and Lucas go on to report the results of their study that they say is the “first individual-level study of school board elections ever conducted in Canada.”  Their study of the Calgary Board of Education found that those who vote in school board elections are likely different from those who vote in municipal council elections. Voters in school board elections are more likely than voters in municipal elections to be highly educated parents who favour partisan positions that are often “left-leaning.”

McGregor and Lucas observe that “studies of school board elections in the United States, where turnout is similarly low, have noted the potential influence of well-organized groups in low-turnout elections that may have distinctly different interests from the wider population” (p. 924). While it would be dangerous to make strong inferences from a single study, the outsized influence of well-organized groups in low-turnout Canadian school board elections may explain why, once elected, trustees find it difficult to see beyond the horizon of their own electors' interests to govern in the interest of all citizens, and why, from time to time, provincial governments find it necessary to intervene on behalf of the wider community.

As decisions are increasingly made by provincial ministries, school boards become less important. Diminished school board importance and low voter turnout for school board elections are likely harbingers of the future of school boards.

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[i] McGregor, R.M. and J. Lucas (2019). Who Has School Spirit? Explaining Voter Participation in School Board Elections. Canadian Journal of Political Science 52, 923–936. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423919000088

[ii] Weinstein v. British Columbia (Minister of Education), [1985] B.C.J. No. 2890

[iii] Alberta School Boards Association of Alberta v. Alberta, [1995] A.J. No. 1317

Taking the public out of public schooling

Taking the public out of public schooling

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[Permission granted to reproduce if authorship is acknowledged]

We see daily the frontal assault on public institutions in the United States by its commander in chief. Castigating the judiciary, eliminating regulations for the protection of the environment, and demeaning anyone whose views are different from his are so quotidian that there is no time to appraise the impact. It is tempting to see them as random acts of a rogue politician, but they are not. They are part of a strategy to destabilize, and sow distrust in, democratic institutions.

The assault on democratic institutions did not originate with the current president of the United States. It has a long, meandering history of smaller skirmishes that were less apparent because they were regional in their focus. They are well documented in several books, but most notably in Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America.

Friends who have read the book argue that Canada is different. Canada’s reliance on peace, order and good government makes us different from the US where “liberty” is one of the elements in the trinity life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Liberty and libertarianism are simply not themes in Canadian politics – well, not very much anyway.

Gone, but not forgotten is Maxime Bernier who deliberately gave the impression that Canada is beset by mass immigration and who thinks the jury is out about climate change. His policy prescriptions were abolishing foreign aid; lowering personal taxes; experimenting with private delivery of health care; and privatizing Canada Post, among others.  

Bernier is gone for now, but these ideas, and ones like them, are a central part of an effort to severely restrict what governments do for citizens in the belief that market forces allow citizens to look after themselves.  Dr. MacLean documents the efforts of the libertarians to give prominence to their ideas and to use those ideas to reduce or eliminate the legislative and regulatory functions of government to permit the private sector to take over public goods for private benefit.

Let me bring the argument to the institution I know best - public schools, the institution most central to the preservation of democracy.

Almost 20 years ago I argued that we were failing our children and grandchildren by ignoring the factors eroding public schools: using public funds for the support of private schools; creating social divisions among families by offering them the opportunity to choose the schools their children attend and segregating them from the children of families who are different; promoting charter schools; allowing for-profit enterprises to provide food services in schools; and diminishing the common experience that schools once provided and their part in transmitting values. If anything, these factors are more prominent today that they were 20 years ago. 

A seemingly small change to Alberta’s Education Act makes a symbolic difference that, in the long term, will have a major impact. Alberta’s Education Act was recently amended to eliminate the word public in public school board. The justification for the change is that it permits all school jurisdictions, now called divisions, to determine, among other thing, the electoral boundaries for the division and the areas from which trustees are elected.

Eliminating the public in public education blurs the lines between public schools, charter schools, and private schools. The change creates the impression that all schools are simply equivalent choices. But they are not. Private schools have great latitude in the students they will admit and retain; public schools accept all students and have relatively well-defined grounds for expelling students. Charter schools may establish the conditions under which teachers teach and students learn - conditions that in public schools are regulated by provincial statute, school board policy, and collective agreements.

As I said before, the elimination of the word “public” in Alberta’s public schools may seem minor, but, in the long run, it will have significant consequences.

Is the decline in public support for education inevitable?

Is the decline in public support for education inevitable?

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[Permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

Increased demands for services combined with tax aversion have put enormous pressure on governments to “do more with less” especially in public schools. Public schooling is suffering and will continue to suffer the ravages of demography, eroding pubic support, increasing privatization, internal migration, and income inequality.

Regardless of the details of the approach (model) for the provision of services, all approaches must consider the numbers of recipients of the service and the resources that the recipients need. This is especially true of public education. Almost everywhere in Canada publicly supported school boards must confront a variety of challenges affecting the number of children enrolled and the funding necessary for their education.

At the most basic level, childlessness is increasing; there are fewer children born to women who are, on average, older than was the case in the past; and the proportion of the school age population is shrinking in relation to the proportion of the population over 65 years of age. In relative terms, the “client base” for public schools is declining and in some places the numbers of school-age children and youth are falling. 

The support that public schools once enjoyed – even among families – is declining relative to other demands. Ensuring employment and caring for an older family member place significant demands on families, diminishing the importance they place on public schooling.

Increasing privatization of education is also eroding enrollments in, and support for, public school systems. Privatization takes many forms: home schooling, virtual schooling, charter schools, religiously-oriented independent schools, elite private schools, ethno-linguistic private schools, specially focused schools (Montessori, Waldorf, etc.). The political and social support that local public schools once enjoyed is being increasingly challenged by school choice and the competition among schools for their “market share.”

The economics of public school are also influenced by the migration of families from less densely populated areas to more densely populated urban areas. The impact of the transition is more pronounced in the schools from which these migrants leave. Schools and services not filled to capacity must still be maintained for the students who remain or must be closed. Schools with small student numbers cannot offer the full range of programs and services that schools with greater numbers can provide. This increases the cost of schooling. Even when schools are closed - a very difficult choice for school authorities - the students must be transported to the nearest available school.

Income inequality is another factor that poses problems for public services, including public schools. Income inequality has grown and continues to grow in Canada and has had a negative impact on the economy. Taxes and government transfers (child benefits, old age security, social assistance, unemployment insurance, etc.) help to reduce, but not eliminate, income inequality. But taxes that support government transfers to reduce inequality compete with claims for increased resources for publically funded schools. Recognizing that transfers are not sufficient to reduce severe inequality, governments are developing poverty reduction strategies. If these strategies are successful, they will reduce the pressure on schools and other services and free up some of government transfers for other purposes.

Schooling produces a good social return on investment. It helps to build capacity and reduce economic inequalities, suggesting that it is in everyone’s interest to cushion public schooling from the forces outlined above. Doing so would require increasing taxation – doubtful in today’s tax averse, political climate. But, even if taxes were increased, the resources generated would probably be insufficient to satisfy the public’s competing demands for public services. Demographic changes and the changing needs of the population will continue to affect the level of resources that institutions such as public schooling receive.

The cognitive benefits of bilingualism

The cognitive benefits of bilingualism

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus of Educational Studies, The University of British Columbia 

[Permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

Until I read the government’s press release, I did not know that February 3-9 is French Immersion Celebration Week. French Immersion Week was proclaimed in Dec 2019 by the Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia, Janet Austin, as an opportunity to celebrate the achievements of French immersion.

French Immersion has grown dramatically over the last 50 years. French immersion began as modest initiative of the mid-1960s responding to parents from St. Lambert (Quebec). Today French immersion enrolls more than 50,00 students in British Columbia and nearly 400,000 students across Canada.

There is indeed much to celebrate about the faith that the parents of St. Lambert had in the benefits that bilingualism would confer on their children. In 2010, colleagues and I set out to examine the cognitive benefits of bilingualism and the magnitude of those benefits. While individual studies have shown that bilingualism confers benefits, we wanted to look at the pattern across studies to gain a clear understanding of the extent and diversity of those benefits.

Beginning with a pool of more than 5,000 articles, we applied rigorous standards to identify publicly available research that used an experimental group of bilingual (or multilingual) participants and a control group of monolingual participants, and reported measurable outcomes with sufficient data for computing the magnitude of the effect of bilingualism. Just more than 60 studies (from 39 articles) survived the application of these standards.

Our results, published in the Review of Educational Research, confirmed that the process of acquiring two languages and of simultaneously managing those languages by inhibiting one so the second can be used without interference allows bilinguals to develop skills that extend into other domains.  

These skills appear to give bilingual speakers insight into the abstract features of language and into their own learning processes; to give bilingual speakers an enhanced capacity to appropriately control and distribute their attention, to develop abstract thinking and use symbols, and to solve problems.

When judged in terms of the probability that the skills of a randomly selected student from the bilingual group will be greater than the skills of a randomly sampled student of the monolingual group, the overall magnitude of the impact of bilingualism is in the range of 65%. In other words, approximately three out of five times the score of a randomly selected student from the bilingual group will be greater than the score of a randomly sampled student of the monolingual group.

The celebration of French immersion in BC includes acting workshops, film festivals, and skating. There will be lots of fun, and I will also be celebrating the enduring, cognitive benefits of bilingualism.