A cesspool of petty politics
‘School boards are really important political entities,” Osgoode Hall law professor Patrick Case told reporters at Queen’s Park on Tuesday. “For a lot of people who come to Canada, this is their first connection with this sort of governance in their lives. … They’re tremendously important to get right.”
Wise words. Alas, school boards have a notorious habit of going very, very wrong. Case, along with veteran public servant Suzanne Herbert, were at the legislature to present their review of the York Region District School Board, which Education Minister Mitzie Hunter requested in January after a festival of bad press. Most notably there was dodgy spending on “jurisdictional l earning” ( edu- speak for “almost certainly pointless international travel”), and there was now-former trustee Nancy Elgie, who refused to resign for months despite being caught on tape calling a student’s mother the N-word ( she claimed a head injury had turned her into a racist; we were to assume she would soon recover).
It is, in a word, withering. Based on their discussions with trustees, Case and Herbert sensed “little appreciation for (trustees’) individual and collective responsibility for the circumstances that … led to this review.” Somehow, in this ultrasensitive era and with York Region’s hugely diverse constituency of students and parents, they evinced no “appreciation of their obligation to take a strong and unequivocal stand against racism and intolerance.” None even launched a code of conduct complaint against Elgie — though in another case a “racialized trustee” was forced “to make an apology for the use of the term ‘white privilege’. ” Case and Herbert found code of conduct complaints “are generally used selectively and as an intimidation tactic,” and described a “culture of fear” among more well- meaning trustees.
Let’s see, what else? Com- munity groups and stakeholder committees complain the board simply isn’t interested in their opinions. “We couldn’t believe why a board of education wouldn’t take those people’s advice,” said Case — “incredible people, people from all walks of life who are really connected with their communities.”
The board is “consumed by infighting,” the review observes. Trustees are lost in their own local agendas, to the detriment of the board’s overall performance. Senior staff complained of “intimidation” and a “downward spiral” under the leadership of the director J. Philip Parappally, to whom the board gave a 10-year contract for reasons neither Case nor Herbert could fathom. “A significant number of ( staff ) who met with us were in tears,” Case and Herbert report.
If much of this sounds terribly familiar, it might be because only two years ago Margaret Wilson found much of the same at the TDSB. Or it might just be because this is more or less how school boards always go to hell, when they do go to hell.
Case and Herbert make 26 recommendations, from banning international travel until a proper vetting policy is in place to human rights and governance training for trustees, and appointing an integrity commissioner to mediate trustees’ internal disputes. Hunter says she expects much progress within a year at most, and stands ready to wield further power. “Message received, loud and clear,” YRDSB chair Loralea Carruthers said in a statement (while complaining of “significant errors of fact” in the review).
But the people who cre- ated this mess are more than a few lunch-and-learns away from a properly functioning school board. “Some suggested the divisiveness within the board is because there are four trustees openly seeking to become candidates for other political offices,” Case and Herbert report. No kidding — that’s one of the basic problems with elected boards. It doesn’t take many members primarily interested in clambering up the political ladder to undo all the good intentions of those who actually want to oversee great schools for their students.
“The school district is a political and organizational invention, not a natural and inevitable phenomenon,” Stephen Anderson, a professor at OISE, wrote in a 2003 paper. “It is therefore quite reasonable to question and critique the role that districts can play in promoting and sustaining quality education.”
Indeed — we don’t directly elect people to provide health care, justice or social services. As it is, barely any of us bother voting for school board. It’s never been 100 per cent clear to me, as a childless misanthrope, why I should even be offered a vote. Meanwhile, the curriculum is provincial. And most parents’ problems get created and solved at the school level, not at the board.
If school boards like York got better, a virtuous cycle might take hold: people would value them more and vote in greater numbers, and Ontario’s children would get smarter and happier and fuller of self- esteem. As it stands, we seem to be cycling in the opposite direction. Other jurisdictions do public education very differently. Ontario can, too, if it wants.