The importance of local school boards
As someone who has worked as a teacher in public schools under both a centralized system and a decentralized system, the major changes now underway to the organization of public education in Nova Scotia are interesting — and cause for concern.
The Nova Scotia government has moved forward with what some critics view as “undue haste” to implement a recommendation by the Glaze Report to dissolve the province’s seven elected regional English-language school boards and to centralize the administration of public education under one provincial advisory council made up of 15 people appointed by the minister of education.
This essentially transfers all decisions, both administrative and policy-based, into the hands of the minister and his bureaucracy.
The report was authored by Avis Glaze, a veteran educator who set up Ontario’s numeracy and literacy secretariat.
Glaze characterized school boards as confused, with unclear roles and responsibilities. She said elected board members are too often acclaimed, turnout for board elections is poor and voters are apathetic. If that is true, perhaps remedies that fall short of the “nuclear option” might have been explored first.
The move comes as no surprise to academics such as the University of Victoria’s Prof. Helen Raptis, who has studied and written about the checkered history of school boards in British Columbia. Over the past 30 years several school boards have been fired by government — almost all of them on the basis of failure to comply with financial directives.
Raptis is on record as supporting local boards until a better structure comes along — this based on the general notion that the best decisions are usually made nearest to the consequences of those decisions.
In B.C., the influence of local communities through their school boards has been eroded in recent years. For example, in 1996, 75 existing school districts were amalgamated into 59 new districts plus the Conseil Scolaire, by the then-NDP government.
Although school-district amalgamation and the reduction in the number of school boards was sold as a cost-saving measure, most observers at the time said that at least some of the amalgamations were blatantly political. Some small districts such as NDP strongholds New Westminster and Gulf Islands were left untouched, while larger rural districts such as Nelson and Creston, separated by a significant and sometimes treacherous mountain pass in winter, were amalgamated.
In terms of cost savings, no serious attempt was made to reduce the number of collective agreements or the number of teachers on the provincial payroll and by September 1998, there were still 70 such agreements. School-district operating costs are 90 per cent payroll-related and, in addition, even the transfer of teachers from one area of the district to another became problematic and subject to costly grievance procedures.
Beyond that, there is little if any evidence that school district consolidation/amalgamation improved the academic achievement of students. In fact, there is more research suggesting that smaller, decentralized school districts result in better educational outcomes, especially for vulnerable students.
But back to personal experience teaching in a decentralized (local school board) or in a significantly centralized system, which public education in Nova Scotia has become. Teaching in a centralized system in New South Wales in the 1960s certainly dampened teacher initiative, enthusiasm and morale.
When a teacher sought approval for anything from authorization to teach a locally developed course to seeking a transfer to a different situation, the request had to struggle up through so many layers of bureaucracy that often the teacher forgot why the request had been made in the first place.
In contrast, when, in my first teaching position in a decentralized system in B.C., I sought permission to teach a locally developed course in creative writing, the principal’s response was: “Walk across to the superintendent’s office and ask him about it. If he agrees to take it to the school board and they give it the green light, you’re good to go.”
I thought I had arrived in teacher-initiative heaven.
It is true that, as Raptis is quoted as saying: “School board members are now overseeing these enormous enterprises … and sometimes they’re not qualified or prepared for the tasks they’ve been elected to do.” That has also sometimes been true in my experience, but, as Raptis again points out, local accountability to a local electorate more often than not balances off against the cumbersome inaccessibility of a government bureaucracy, and, let’s face it, bureaucracies are generally not characterized by progressive thinking and willingness to take risks.
Progress in any enterprise requires both, and public education is no different. It could be simply because of that that Nova Scotia education might have taken a step backward.