New TDSB head looking beyond ‘culture of fear’
John Malloy keeping everything above board in effort to put backroom drama in the past
Six weeks after taking the hottest seat in Ontario education, John Malloy is working hard to undo the Toronto District School Board’s culture of fear.
The interim director of education called the board’s 900 principals and viceprincipals to a meeting and gave them a survey that asks their advice on what needs fixing.
He’s preaching a new no-secrets tone at a head office long rocked by backroom drama.
“Everyone who meets me wants to talk about the culture of fear and I understand that,” Malloy said in an interview Thursday. “But what I have to be talking about, or I won’t be effective in this role, is what we can do to move forward.”
The board hired the veteran educator for up to 18 months as it looks for a successor to education director Donna Quan. The controversial Quan, cited by two outside reports as a divisive, often heavy-handed leader, was seconded by Queen’s Park in November to work on a task force about student demographic surveys. Many saw it as a gracious exit strategy for a bureaucrat unable to unite staff or trustees.
A large part of Malloy’s challenge is to mend internal fences and restore public faith in Canada’s largest school board. He’s met widely with trustees, senior staff and community groups, with unions to come this month, in a bid to shift the focus away from infighting and politics and back to student learning.
“The entire system needs to be directed to schools, as opposed to schools responding to what the system is saying,” he said. “I met with principals so they could get to know me and know that I am passionately committed to supporting schools.”
Under Malloy, the board will be more bottom-up than top-down, he said, to respond to the needs of individual schools. Yet there also must be strong board-wide priorities.
One idea he has “put on the table” is to find a consistent way to help stu- dents who have not learned to read by the end of Grade 1. Schools now use a range of approaches, but Malloy wants to explore using one strategy across the city.
“We know that students need to be reading by the end of Grade 1, so we have to do everything in our power to make that happen. It is important to communicate some non-negotiables. That’s what makes us a strong system.”
The board seems to be leaving scandal behind. It’s poised to hire its first integrity commissioner and is drafting a new whistleblower policy. Malloy’s walkabout style of management “has been very refreshing, especially for staff to be consulted that way,” said TDSB chair Robin Pilkey.
The clouds may be lifting in its relationship with Queen’s Park as well. On Wednesday, just before the TDSB’s monthly meeting, Education Minister Liz Sandals paid an unprecedented visit to the board office for a “meet-and-greet” that Pilkey called “a lovely gesture. She said she hadn’t been to the board before and wanted to meet some of the new trustees elected in the last election.
“At first, we wondered why she wanted to come. But then we thought, it can’t be bad — when she wants to yell at us, she usually does that from Queen’s Park.”