The recent sacking of Vancouver’s school trustees raises an obvious question: Do boards of education still have a meaningful role to play?
The trustees were dumped for refusing to submit a balanced budget, as provincial law requires. That left the education minister little choice. How could he ask other boards to play by the rules if he made an exception in this case?
But that was not the only issue of concern. Before their ouster, board members had been accused of bullying by the senior management team, all of whom took sick leave. Clearly, relationships had deteriorated past the point of no return.
Yet Vancouver is home to the province’s largest school board. If an organization that size collapsed in disorder, what chance do smaller districts have?
There is a broader problem here than mere personality clashes or sniping around the boardroom table.
True, the fired trustees were clearly cruising for a bruising. You have to wonder if they actually wanted to be canned, rather than make difficult decisions with which they disagreed.
However the real issue is that we are asking the impossible of boards. Yes, they are required to balance budgets. But how?
Few trustees have ever run a major company. There is no requirement that they have a background in finance, management or personnel selection.
They campaign on platforms that focus almost exclusively on classroom matters. That might seem natural, and so it is.
But they don’t get elected to teach. They get elected to manage. And their only hope of accomplishing that is if they have standards of best practice to guide them.
Unfortunately, they don’t. What is the correct ratio between overhead and classroom resources? Or between teachers and their aides? How many sick days are too many (after the shenanigans in Vancouver, I guess the sky’s the limit).
At what point, in terms of class size, does overcrowding interfere with the process of learning? How are pupils with moderate to severe handicaps best brought into the student body?
These are all vital matters that affect — indeed, determine — the bottom line. Yet there is little evidence-based consensus around any of them. Trustees are left to wrestle with such imponderables in isolation.
Now you might say, well, that’s why we have management teams — to provide the knowledge that trustees might lack. But here a second problem arises. Virtually every administrator who gains promotion to superintendent began his or her career as a teacher and progressed within the system.
Other public-sector organizations hire their senior executives from a much wider range of backgrounds. For example, only one of the CEOs who have run Island Health since its inception trained as nurse or physician. The others had top-level experience in areas unrelated to patient care.
This form of inbreeding takes another shape. Most school boards have members who are, or were, teachers. That brings to the decision-making table trustees whose interests might be conflicted.
(It was to avoid this problem that the province chose to make health-authority boards appointed, not elected.)
In effect, we have a busted model here. Boards are not given the tools they need to make difficult decisions.
Their objectivity is compromised by the presence of trustees with divided loyalties.
And the education profession has failed to seek out leaders from beyond its own perimeters, preferring instead to run what is essentially a closed shop.
I believe there is still a role for boards (though whether we need 60 is another matter). Parents require some means to exercise some control over the schooling of their children.
But after the meltdown in Vancouver, our educators need to understand that serious harm has been done to public confidence. Reforms are overdue.
