In 1970, when I began my B.C. teaching career, it was encouraging to find the governance of local education very different from the highly centralized system of public education in New South Wales where I had been teaching for the previous four years.
Public schools in N.S.W. in the ’60s were organized and controlled centrally from the Department of Education offices in Sydney.
Any curricular initiative that might flourish in a teacher’s imagination, any variation from the rigidity of the prescribed curriculum, was either frowned upon or needed approval from so many levels of the central bureaucracy that the original intention was lost by the time any approval made its way back down through those many offices.
New to the B.C. system, I couldn’t imagine how a decentralized system, at least partially controlled by an elected non-educator group of people, could possibly be effective.
Keen in my first B.C. teaching job to find out how this local school board system worked, I approached the principal with the outline of a Grade 11 course I wanted to teach.
“Looks OK to me,” he said, pointing to a building across from his office. “Go over there and talk to the superintendent about it. If he agrees with you he’ll recommend it to the board of trustees and you’re good to go.”
“Teacher Nirvana,” I thought. “This is why I travelled 10,000 miles to pursue innovative opportunity in my profession.”
Boards of trustees in those days had a real say over what went on in their local school systems and were in a position to add substantial progressive value to public education.
But things have changed, and over the past 40 years, successive provincial governments, not just in B.C. but across Canada, have incrementally centralized the public-education system, stripping trustees of much of their formal decision-making power. Governments have lost sight of the management credo that the best decisions are usually made nearest to the consequences of those decisions.
Today, trustees can no longer levy property taxes, set curricula or regulate the teaching profession. In the last round of teacher negotiations, they were deliberately benched and replaced by a couple of government-appointed policy wonks.
Government, it seemed, had lost confidence in the significance and usefulness of community school trustees and hobbled their effectiveness.
In a recent article in the magazine The Walrus, Charles Ungerleider, formerly a B.C. deputy minister of education and member of the Vancouver School Board, is quoted: “I regret to say that, for a whole host of reasons, trustees don’t add much value.”
It is often true, as Walrus writer John Lorinc recently suggested in his article Class Dismissed — Do We Really Need School Trustees, that “school boards are the farm teams for local politics — a political trampoline for a shot at higher office.”
While there are still some candidates for trustee positions who want to contribute to education, others are single-issue aspirants who see education as a way of achieving certain ideological or sometimes large “P” political goals.
But it needn’t be that way. At the 2016 B.C. School Trustees’ Association annual general meeting next April, motions will be brought forward, once again, aimed at restoring some semblance of both dignity and local community control in public education.
Proponents point out that as long as boards have little executive authority over local public education, quality candidates will be reluctant to come forward and community confidence will continue to erode, while the worth of local school boards and the quality of trustee candidacy continues to be questioned.
Ironically, and with provincial governments in Canada still heading in the other direction, New South Wales, which has had centralized control of education since Day 1, is moving, for the first time, toward decentralization.
Beginning with a 2012 initiative called Local Schools Local Decisions, N.S.W. public-school principals, the people immediately responsive to their communities, will be assigned more authority over budget and staffing matters.
Here in B.C., such a move might require stronger voices from within the school trustees’ association.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
