In the second act, education takes the place of health

Something’s got to go, and apparently the province needs an education department, no matter how dysfunctional, so let’s off the school boards.

In case you didn’t believe teachers about a year back when they told you Nova Scotia’s education system was a steaming mess, it was confirmed last Tuesday by an Ontario education consultant.

Avis Glaze concluded that the “crisis of low achievement” requires drastic action, so off with the heads and out with the bodies of seven regional school boards. The CSAP would remain intact.

Nova Scotians have earned the right to be skeptical of the remedy Dr. Glaze prescribed for a school system that exhausted her ready supply of disparaging adjectives.

In the Stephen McNeil government’s first term, nine health authorities were collapsed into the Nova Scotia Health Authority, which hasn’t been earning rave reviews. It looks like school boards will suffer a similar fate in the government’s second act.

The boards are neither a source of voter affection nor a vibrant symbol of democracy. Last time out, 61 of 97 school board posts were filled by acclamation, so the government won’t grope for talking points to respond to critics of the boards’ demise.

McNeil and Education Minister Zack Churchill may have more trouble explaining why, on their watch, the education department swooned away four more years of your kids’ education.

“Right now, the department and eight school boards have a dysfunctional relationship, with student achievement and learning continuing to suffer,” wrote Dr. Glaze, who emphasized that the “achievement gap” for African Nova Scotian and Mi’kmaw students is a persistent and troubling problem that must be addressed immediately.

The department, the report says, either isn’t or can’t be trusted, so a new, independent office needs to take on responsibility for student assessment.

There’s nothing like a new education bureaucracy to tell the old education bureaucracy how to do the job it hasn’t been able to do up to now.

Many observers, including the Nova Scotia Teachers Union and other unions, believe the recommendation to do away with school boards was preordained, but the provincial government needed licence to kill them off.

Dr. Glaze bristled at that notion last Tuesday, asserting she was given freedom to come to her own conclusions.

While her report provides the province with the independent recommendation it needs to close all but one school board – the Conseil scolaire acadien provincial would survive – that recommendation comes at a price.

The report is an indictment of a government that failed Nova Scotian kids. The government can claim that many of the problems in the school system predate its election in 2013, but it can’t escape four years of continuing deterioration that culminated in this damming report.

Dr. Glaze found “dysfunction, turf wars, mistrust, lack of communication, inconsistency in terms of curriculum and outcomes, and ultimately a failure to move the school system forward,” culminating in “a crisis of low achievement in a province with an education administrative system that can seem too cumbersome, conflicted and adversarial to get to the urgent matters of student performance.”

Yikes. What do we do now? It turns out we have no choice but to rely on the same outfit that presided at the funeral to perform the miracle of resurrection.

Rather than address “system dysfunction” the provincial government created “work-arounds” such as the Council on Classroom Conditions, the Principals’ Forum, and the Commission on Inclusive Education, the report said. In a working system, the voices of teachers, principals, parents and the community would have been heard through established channels.

The school boards and the education department share responsibility for the failure.

The report is clear that structural change won’t fix a thing in Nova Scotia’s schools, unless there is a change in culture across the entire system.

Nova Scotians who care about their kids’ education should listen to the education minister respond to the report today and learn how the provincial government intends to change a toxic culture, after four years of breathing it in and blowing it out.