Dumping school boards: era of the educrat

We soon won’t have school boards to kick around anymore. Education Minister Zach Churchill wasted no time Wednesday in acting on many recommendations of consultant Avis Glaze’s report on school-system governance. That includes the school board nuclear option. He’s scrapping the seven elected regional boards and keeping only the Acadian board as an elected voice in school governance.

The new governance model will be an all-bureaucrat, hub-and-spoke affair. Regional superintendents will stay on as executive directors to run regional board offices and take orders from the education deputy minister in Halifax.

Glaze thinks this will lead to less administrative friction and more focus on student performance. She expects financial savings, as back-office functions like payroll and human resources are consolidated. The minister says savings will go to classrooms and improving “the role and influence” of school advisory councils.

More likely, these volunteers will have a battle to avoid being managed and ignored by the deputy and regional directors. Ask community volunteers how they’ve made out with superintendents and the department in trying to create innovative hub schools. They were defeated at every turn by inflexible, hostile department criteria.

Will rule by expert bureaucrats improve our children’s education? Who knows? It’s certainly been hard to love school boards recently. Three were fired for serious failings (poor financial oversight, squabbling, secret factional deals) and a fourth got a minder to improve student-performance oversight. Their democratic vitality isn’t great, either: 63 per cent of members are there by acclamation.

But it’s hard to lay all the blame for student results on school boards when the department decides so many things, from curriculum to budgets. The province’s enrolment-dominated funding formula has driven school closures and consolidations. Glaze wants a more flexible formula to allow for “grassroots, bottom-up innovations.” School boards wanted and needed that, too.

The minister is also adopting less controversial changes that make sense: removing principals and supervisors from the teachers’ union, increasing class time for support specialists, letting teachers and principals choose texts and course material, allowing more teacher mobility, creating a regulatory body for teachers. There’s no action yet on Glaze’s proposals for an education ombudsman and an independent office to assess student progress.

Glaze says she doesn’t reject elected boards in general; it’s just that ours aren’t working to improve student performance. It’s an odd argument. Shouldn’t voters just change the members of elected bodies that under-perform? Is it really better to shrug that we’re no good at school democracy here and just leave it to central bureaucrats?

Elected boards do one good thing bureaucracy doesn’t. They meet and make decisions in public. The deputy and directors won’t be doing that. If their decision-making process is poor or misinformed, we won’t see it. That’s already a problem with the single provincial health authority. Centralized bureaucratic decision-making, without transparency or effective local input, has alienated front-line providers, the public and under-served communities and has made a doctor shortage worse. What’s to prevent similar problems with the new model of education?