Primal instinct could mar inclusion program
The province earns high marks for good answers to the toughest problems facing Nova Scotia’s public schools, students, and teachers, but the final grade will depend on whether the government makes good on a promise to show its work.
Education Minister Zach Churchill said the government is moving forward with the entire package of ambitious recommendations delivered this spring by the commission on inclusive education, except for one. He won’t be creating an independent institute or commission to monitor, evaluate and report on progress.
Having just eliminated elected school boards – except the French language board – the province might have been more sensitive to the need for transparent accountability somewhere in the public education system. Sensitivity, however, is not this government’s forté. Nor is accountability.
Instead of solid reporting, the education department is delivering a loose promise. It will hire an outside researcher to do the evaluation and report publicly once a year. The minister said the government would enter into a three-year agreement with the researcher – likely a company or some other organization – with an option for renewal.
Premier Stephen McNeil’s government has a basic understanding – almost a primal instinct – when it comes to accountability. In a view the premier has expressed – although not in so many words – accountability begins with the general election call and ends about five weeks after the ballots are counted. Every four or five years the politicians and the people get together and “do” accountability.
Churchill argues with surprising conviction that the independent researcher on the education department’s payroll will be more concerned with his, her or its professional reputation than with a contract renewal, so he, she or it can be trusted to report the complete, unvarnished truth to Nova Scotians, regardless of the political damage that might inflict on the government.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we all shared his wide-eyed innocence?
The government is spending about 15 million of your dollars to add almost 200 specialists and classroom assistants to Nova Scotia’s schools come September. Teachers’ prayers for help with behavioural, mental health and learning issues have been answered. Whether they’ve been answered with enough of the right help, time and the contracted researcher will tell.
The new personnel and programs have not been doled out according to the old education funding formula – based on dollars-per-student. Instead, education department officials say they attempted to match resources to needs, and that changes, refinements and possibly additions are expected depending on what lessons experience holds.
The commission on inclusive education found the most dangerous gaps in access to specialists exist in rural Nova Scotia. Although 21 of the 70 new specialist teachers are headed for the Halifax region, under the funding formula the region would receive more than 30. Among the seven regions, Halifax gets the largest share of resources, but that is both understandable and unavoidable given that almost 50,000 of the province’s 118,000 school kids are in the Halifax municipality.
With the abolition of school boards, Churchill said members of the legislature will have to assume the public-facing role formerly filled by elected school board members to advocate and agitate on behalf of their communities and local interests.
That being the case, he can solve the obvious flaw in his “independent” researcher scheme and eliminate the perception of a conflict that is now apparent to all but the minister and his department.
The research and reporting function, rather than vested with the department, could be an agent of the legislature. If MLAs from all parties are expected to be the new de facto school boards, they should have fair and equal access to the reporting entity, in the same way they have access to the auditor general, who is fully independent of the government as a servant of the legislature.
As it now stands, the government is doing the right thing, but risks tarnishing the results by casting a pall of plausible incredulity over any findings of a researcher funded by the department.
The minister’s aversion to the creation of bureaucracy with its certain and predictable cost escalation is a legitimate argument against the institute recommended by the inclusion commission. But his solution to the accountability gap is fundamentally flawed.
He talks about making the box fit the lid, as opposed to the other way around, as the goal of the inclusion program. While he’s thinking about boxes, maybe he should think outside one and move the evaluation and reporting function to the legislature, or somewhere it would be, and be seen to be, truly independent.