BY PAUL W. BENNETT
GUEST OPINION
School boards have been sinking for the past decade and are now disappearing in Nova Scotia. An astute prophecy issued by Memorial University governance expert Gerald Galway back in September 2013 has essentially come to pass. Without vocal and visible public support, elected school boards and trustees have disappeared, perishing of natural causes in the “quiet acquiescence to centralization.”
Centralization of educational policy-making since the 1990s has gradually eroded the governance role and significance of school districts in relation to provincial education authorities. Provincial government policies, driven by a metropolitan-centric perspective and a management efficiency ethos exemplified in the adoption of testing and accountability programs, have promoted further administrative and school consolidation.
The trend toward provincialization ran counter to the core democratic mandate of elected school trustees and school-level governance everywhere. On the Island, regional authority over education has been eliminated, direct links to parents and communities have evaporated, and virtually all education decisions are made within the Public Schools Branch. Provincial advisory councils lack democratic legitimacy. Local education governance is completely on the rocks.
latest AIMS policy paper reviewed the history of school board dissolution and proposed flipping the system (i.e., re-building the education governance system from the schools up).
Confronting today’s Public School Branch governance model in the board room or your local school gymnasium, it’s all too obvious that all decisions flow from the premier’s office, supported by the education minister and his officials. American and British school reformers call this shadowy, comfortable education establishment - “the blob.” If P.E.I. has a “blob,” it is comparatively small group of ‘educrats’ and one now ensconced in the Public Schools Branch.
School district consolidation is driven by education ministries looking for cost reductions, but in many cases, the trigger factor is eliminating elected intermediaries either resisting top-down directives or advocating local policy variations such as saving schools threatened with closure.
Cost savings from school district consolidation are rarely reported and far from clear. A 2013 U.S. National Education Policy Center study concluded that “claims for educational benefits from systematic state-wide school and district consolidation are vastly overestimated.”
Restructuring education has come to mean consolidating school districts and gradually eliminating elected school boards. In Prince Edward Island, clear-cutting school districts and regional boards has left local, community interests without any meaningful, two-way governance role and voiceless outside the formalized school closure and rezoning process.
The new “made-in- P.E.I.” model of education governance faced its first critical test during the province-wide school closure battles of 2016-17. When the P.E.I. government resumed its school closure process in October 2016, the whole plan, Better Learning For All, aroused a firestorm of rural school protest.
The three-person Public Schools Branch Board, chaired by the Deputy Minister of Education, Susan Willis, was exposed as a sham. Confronted with a barrage of public resistance, spearheaded by a Rural Strong movement, Premier Wade MacLauchlan and Minister Doug Currie finally relented on April 4, 2017 and pulled the plug on the whole top-down exercise.
The School Closure debacle demonstrated that the current model was incapable of engaging local citizens in decisions affecting the rural schools. A year later, it is time to break the cycle and fix local education governance.
Education is a public service with complex, diverse operations that would greatly benefit from being more flexible and responsive as well as responsible to students, teachers, parents and communities. Decentralizing governance can provide governments with an effective means of improving student outcomes, streamlining administration, and increasing community ownership over schools.
The best course of action would be to announce a gradual, planned transition to a more locally-accountable and representative School-Community Governance model, replacing P.E.I. Public School Branch domination with autonomous, self-governing school governing councils. It would also set a clear direction and allow for the further development, at a later stage, of regional coordinating bodies to be known as District Education Development Councils.
Reclaiming our schools starts with a three-step re-engineering plan: establish viable community school governance, re-couple school districts and school governing councils, and reinvest any savings into supporting students and teachers in the classroom. That would set the system right-side up – for students, teachers, parents and communities.
- Paul W. Bennett, EdD, Director of Schoolhouse Institute, is author of the February 2018 AIMS policy paper Re-engineering Education: A Cure for the Democratic Accountability Deficit.
