Is keeping trustees the win-win solution?
Officials in T.O. are elected, NYC’s are appointed — the jury is still out on what’s best
With a Bronx accent and New York straight talk, Mona Davids has a warning for Canada: Don’t give up elected school boards. When New York City did that, parents of one million students lost their voice.
“Your schools may have their problems, but at least you have power through the voters’ booth,” said the 41-year-old founder of the New York City Parents’ Union, created four years ago out of the frustration of dealing with a school board that is now wholly appointed by politicians.
What happens in the Big Apple, the largest school board in North America, is of interest to Canada’s largest school board in Toronto, which is under threat of being broken up for being too unwieldy.
So how does a school system with four times as many students as the Toronto District School Board — and eight times the budget — run?
Simple. Out of the mayor’s office. With no elected officials.
It’s one model of many that could be a fix for the dysfunction that plagues the Toronto District School Board, models that educators and critics are pushing the province to consider.
The Toronto board will hear from a provincial adviser later this week on how to move ahead with changes to how it is run, but it is believed that anything that happens in Toronto could affect other public boards in the province.
In New York, former mayor Michael Bloomberg took over a network of small, scandal-plagued school boards in 2002 and created a sleek new citywide board with 13 members, all appointed — eight by the mayor and one by each of the city’s five boroughs (Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island).
They weren’t called trustees, they weren’t paid and he didn’t even call it a school board — it’s the Panel for Education Policy — and when two of Bloomberg’s appointees disagreed with his plan to stop promoting kids automatically from one grade to the next, he fired them just hours before the vote.
Even the 32 new local parent-based councils he created to advise the new board are “completely ineffective,” said Davids, who says her group will lobby to have the five borough appointments to the Panel for Education Policy replaced with elected members this June when the mayor-run system is up for review at the state legislature.
“My advice is, don’t give up any say in how your children are educated.”
But many argue that you can have elected trustees without having them overstep their boundaries, and many jurisdictions have had success with models very different than Ontario’s.
New Brunswick actually scrapped school boards altogether between 1997 and 2001, until public opinion forced it to restore some sort of elected body. But when it did, it set clear limits to their right to get involved in front-line issues — no lobbying for an individual parent’s child, no say in hiring principals, no encouragement to show up unannounced at a school. It’s a hands-off role that focuses on citywide policy.
Australia and New Zealand have eliminated district school boards altogether and instead given each school its own board. Finland and Sweden let municipalities oversee their schools, with each school having its own board. The options can seem dizzying. Gerald Galway, who recently co-authored a national report on school boards, said that in the past, Newfoundland and Quebec appointed or partially appointed boards, and “these systems were widely criticized as being inefficient, discriminatory and undemocratic, and were replaced — in the case of Newfoundland, by public referendum — by public systems and democratically elected school boards.”
Galway, an education professor at Memorial University in Newfoundland, said his research has found that “local democracy authority for most decisions about teaching and learning” is worth retaining, while leaving things like the curriculum to the provincial government.
But amid the unending scandals at the Toronto District School Board, educators are wondering if there is a better way for the city, and even other parts of the province, where board problems are also common, though not as prominent.
“The best governance model is where you can ensure complementary skills around the table,” said former deputy education minister Charles Pascal, now a professor at the University of Toronto’s faculty of education.
“People who get there through some kind of process . . . people with different skill sets, different experiences” can focus on “doing fewer things better rather than all things less well.”
Well-run boards have staggered terms, he said, to ensure experience is balanced by the fresh ideas of newer appointees who represent the community’s diversity.
While elections can bring new blood to a school board, there should be a limit to how long a trustee can remain, warned Pascal, who doesn’t think a trustee who serves 40 years is a good thing.
While some parents worry about dealing with bureaucrats without an elected official in their corner, Pascal said it is principals and superintendents who should be listening to parents, and be heavily involved in communities.
Schools already have councils made up of parents, the principal and a teacher, and if these are democratic and inclusive they should provide parents all the voice they need, he added.
“If (the school council) is working well, and you have a principal who ensures it is working well and one who is respectful of school councils, why do you need trustees meandering around, trying to solve all these issues? Why do you need trustees with expense accounts for professional development going off in 22 directions, rather than two or three directions and pulling together?”
He wants the province to strike a task force to examine different models “against the backdrop of what’s best for students and teachers in Ontario.
“I think it’s time to do that.” Tomorrow: Is the TDSB too big?