Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is
acknowledged]
In last
week’s blog, I wrote that advocacy with provincial governments is typically
handled poorly by most school boards in part because school boards fail to
appreciate that they are in an asymmetrical relationship to provincial
governments. A second reason that efforts at advocacy are often unsuccessful is
that those efforts are often poorly planned. To succeed, advocacy must be part
of a carefully conceived and executed plan.
Careful
consideration must be given to the desired outcome. Asking whether it is
possible to achieve the outcome is an important and often unasked question.
Does the body one is trying to persuade possess the authority and capacity to
produce the outcome? Asking a body for something that it lacks the authority to
produce cannot succeed. For example, a body that is a party to a contract
cannot provide or produce an outcome that will require it to change the
contract to which it is committed without the agreement of the other parties to
the contract. Asking government for additional funding after it has passed its
budget is unlikely to succeed because it requires altering a decision to which
the government has committed itself.
Asking for something
of which other school boards also believe they are deserving puts the
government in an awkward position. It cannot give to one board something that
all or most boards believe they need. And asking a government to do something
that is contrary to their political commitments is also unrealistic.
The
challenges that school boards face in advocating with senior governments are
formidable and numerous. All school boards have limited resources (time, money,
and personnel) they can dedicate to advocacy efforts. Resources are even more
limited in smaller boards. Governments
have many competing priorities. Health care, housing affordability, poverty
reduction, homelessness, and climate change are more likely to be ahead of education
on government’s agenda.
Education
– like most public issues – occurs in a complex policy landscape that most
school boards do not consider when they decide to advocate for their interests.
How does the issue about which the school board wishes to advocate align with government’s
beliefs and commitments? Can addressing the issue that the school board wishes
to have addressed help government achieve its priorities and commitments?
Supply the evidence.
Advocacy
efforts are inherently political. They are about whose values will be approved
and supported, and whose will not. It is important to understand the interests
and agendas at play. The campaign is not simply the “ask.” The campaign must include
consideration of how, to whom, and by whom the request will be made. I’ll
address these issues in my next blog.