Don’t promise what you can’t deliver

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

School board elections will be held in many municipalities across the country this fall. So, it is not surprising that I am beginning to receive candidate statements in my snail-mail box and my e-mail inbox.  

A theme running through some candidate statements is “revitalizing the public’s voice in school board decisions” or “supporting democracy and citizen involvement.” Those would be admirable goals given the historically low citizen turnout for school board elections. But candidates are not really seeking greater involvement of the citizenry with its schools but rather giving greater expression to the voices of interest or stakeholder groups. Some candidates are more explicit about their intentions, “. . . help make our district a place where families are heard, and educators are supported.”  

Many of the trustees seek office to do what is properly the work of the school superintendent. A school superintendent is responsible for implementing the goals articulated by the board and ensuring compliance with the school act and other applicable legislation. Many candidates want to dictate how the superintendent carries out the goals set by the board, or they imply that interest groups will be empowered to determine how goals and policies are implemented.  

Many candidates are activists – as I was when I ran for a school board. They are members of school or district parent advisory committees, organizations that advocate on behalf of students with special needs, former teachers and former school and district administrators, former members of the executives of teacher unions and other employee groups. There is nothing wrong with having been an advocate. However, when elected, the candidate who is an activist must transition to being a trustee that serves on a board responsible for all students.  

Trustees must engage with one another to determine a set of collective goals and priorities. When candidates come from different value perspectives it is doubtful that all goals and priorities of individual trustees can become board goals and priorities. That is, unless trustees say to one another, “I’ll support what you want, if you support what I want.” When that happens, boards wind up with long lists of goals and no priorities. Priorities must be established so that the superintendent can allocate scarce resources (and resources are always scarce).  

Boards with long lists of goals inevitably become dissatisfied with their superintendents because those superintendents cannot achieve the goals without knowing the board’s priorities. Trustees that have not developed a district-wide perspective continue to press for the goal or goals for which they advocate. When they perceive that those goals are not being pursued or pursued as quickly as they would like, they often try to bypass the superintendent and engage the district leader in whose domain the goal resides.  

This makes a bad situation worse. Boards work with and through their only employee, the superintendent. Boards, not individual trustees, can give the superintendent direction. Individual trustees have no authority. When they bypass the superintendent and engage staff, they are communicating lack of confidence in the superintendent and putting the staff in a very awkward position. Staff report to the superintendent and their performance is judged by the superintendent. Chaos and conflict are the inevitable outcomes of trustees who are trying to give direction to staff.  

Dysfunctional school boards are composed of trustees who cannot work together. Dysfunction places an unreasonable burden on the superintendent who is responsible for district operations. Superintendents often try to “manage the board” while they manage the school district. Managing a dysfunctional board is impossible and takes time from managing the district. District operations sometimes suffer, though I am often impressed by the efforts of superintendents whose boards are dysfunctional. If they are aware of the dysfunction, governments will often dismiss the board and appoint someone to act as the board on an interim basis.  

Board dysfunction begins with trustees who do not understand their roles and who are unable to see past their personal goals to fashion goals and priorities for the school district. When that happens, education suffers.  Students benefit when trustees agree on a small number of achievable goals and entrust the superintendent to work with his or her staff to accomplish them.

Celebrating School

 

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

The approach of school opening fills most parents with mixed emotions. They prize the time they have been able to connect with their children, but they welcome the return to school. We should, too.

School opening should be the cause for celebration for society because it is one of the few common, collective social experiences we have. As such, it is a counterforce to an increasingly fragmented social experience. Connections via social media are still connections though the nature and content of the interactions among people are limited. Online gaming, for example, is a social experience among people who might not otherwise see one another face-to-face, but the experience itself is constrained by technology and the content.

School closures during COVID-19 made us acutely aware of the isolation and loneliness that many experienced. COVID-19 also heightened appreciation of teachers.

Both loneliness and social isolation are linked to negative cognitive and health outcomes for individuals. School mitigates them for the individual. But schools do much more.

What one learns in school is quite different from what one learns at home. Home-schooled children may develop the capacity to read and reason. Home schooled children are often not exposed to the social, linguistic, economic, and cultural diversity characteristic of most schools. 

Schools help us to learn that our experiences are like the experiences of many others. They expose students to norms of behaviour that are necessary to regulate social interaction in groups larger than the family. In school we learn to care for, and associate with, people outside one’s kinship group.  

Schools are environments with achievement standards that are universally applied to all similarly situated students save the few whose performance is impeded by physical, emotional, or cognitive limitations not under their control. 

It is in school that students also learn the difference between the position (teacher) and the person occupying the position (Ms Singh, Mr. Frederickson, etc.).  

In a conversation with a business acquaintance about these capacities that schools develop she said, “you mean the value-added component of schooling.” I said I was reluctant to use that term because it implied that these capacities added value to the formal curriculum. From my perspective these capacities and the capacities developed by the formal curriculum are central to what schools contribute to the development of the individual. It is through the development of these capacities (and others) in the individual that what we call society is maintained.  

The dramatic increase in access to information that the internet has made possible has not diminished the importance of schools to society. It is precisely the opposite. The pervasiveness of largely unmediated content, the ability to transmit that content without critical reflection, and the fragmentation that social media and the internet make possible heightens the importance of institutions that help bind us to one another.  

Schools are, for most, a unifying force in a society that is increasingly fragmented and socially isolated. We should celebrate the contribution that they make to our society.