Thursday, April 21, 2022

What is the role of a school board trustee?

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

There were several interesting articles in the January 2022 issue of the Canadian Journal for Educational Administration and Policy (CJEAP) including ones devoted to racial justice, the incorporation of Indigenous content in curricula, and public school funding. But the one that prompted this blog was about public expectations of school boards 

I was struck by an apparent contradiction between the first sentence in the article and one of the key findings of the study. The article’s abstract begins with the assertion that “School board trustees play an important role in the education of children throughout Ontario.” I take a slightly more nuanced position: school board trustees can play an important role in the education of children.  

At the core of the study was the open-ended question: “What do you see as the role of a school board trustee?” More than 2500 Ontarians over the age of 18 responded to an online survey in which parents with school age children were over-represented. The most frequent response to the question was “don’t know/unsure.” The second most frequent response was a cluster of random thoughts that the authors coded as “irrelevant.” And the third most frequent responses were a set of seemingly random comments that the authors classified as “other.” When the most frequently occurring responses were combined with those that indicated that trustees have “no role,” they accounted for more than one-third of the respondents to the survey. The remaining two-thirds focused on administrative and educational oversight, and advocacy. One of the general conclusions the authors drew was: “. . . it is clear that about a third of the respondents do not have a clear concept of what trustees do.”  

Later in the paper, the authors draw two inferences from their data that are a bit of a stretch. One is that the role of school trustee is not relevant to many Ontarians because many do not appear to understand the role. And the second is that the lack of understanding is evidence of why provincial governments have considered abolishing school boards and, thus, the position of trustee.  

I’d argue that lack of public understanding of the position of trustee (even of the magnitude revealed in this study) does not mean that trustees cannot play an important role in the education of children. Provincial governments have contemplated and even attempted to abolish school boards not because a large segment of the public lacks understanding but because school trustees and boards do not have substantial constituencies that will oppose abolition.  

Whether there is a future for school trustees and the school boards upon which they serve depends upon how well trustees adhere to their main responsibilities. The most important responsibility of school boards is the recruitment and employment of a superintendent (director of education, chief superintendent). The only employee the board itself hires and the school district’s principal educational leader, the superintendent, is responsible for ensuring that the board’s goals and objectives are met.  

The second most important responsibility is the board’s annual evaluation of the superintendent.  Because s/he is responsible for the achievement of the board’s goals and objectives, the performance of the school district is synonymous with the performance of the superintendent.  

Improving student outcomes and ensuring compliance with the board’s obligations should be the focus of the superintendent’s annual appraisal. Key to a board’s effectiveness are the metrics it develops for the assessment of student progress, well-being, and equity. Effective boards collect data regularly, often annually, and chart the trends in performance over time.  

In the absence of evidence that its one employee, the superintendent (director), is improving educational outcomes and equity, school trustees cannot claim that they play an important role in the education of children – a role they should make better known.