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CBC Asks Whether We Need School Boards
GUEST BLOG BY FRANK GUE, SQE DIRECTOR
Old Adage: If you have no objective, any route will get you there.
Many, perhaps all, Ontario school boards operate without an objective, thus will be found wandering “any route” ("You, ladies and gentlemen, are an expensive rubber stamp,” as a Taxpayers' Coalition representative once told one school board).
Asked for their objective, a Board will produce a nicely-worded statement of purpose or mission, full of impressive words like “quality”, “excellence”, and “higher order thinking” - but glaringly lacking any word like “results”.
Why? Because the Education Establishment furiously, determinedly, consistently, and purposefully excuses itself from accountability for results. In a recent edition of Performance Standards for Teachers, a black-bordered paragraph explicitly denied any responsibility for results, stating instead that they arise from societal factors - socio-economic conditions, etc.
While educators have difficulty with the word “results”, we taxpaying serfs do not. Most of us naively think that the purpose of an education system is to Educate Children, an idea emphatically rejected by the Chair of a recent Teachers Performance Appraisal System task force. Equally innocently, most of us would agree that Education should include, at minimum, an ability to read, write, and calculate. Sadly, Statistics Canada tells us that 53% of adult Canadians cannot.
Thus the answer to the CBC’s question, do we need school boards, is: Yes, but not as now constituted. We must state an objective for school boards written by a group comprising the likes of auto mechanics, farmers, musicians, and policemen that excludes educators on the grounds of conflict of interest. Boards themselves should comprise groups of similar worthies whose stated purpose is to write policies that address the objective; such policies to include demonstrated mastery of the basic minima such as reading, writing, and calculating, plus clauses to address local concerns (which is approximately the Sahlberg, or Finnish, model).
First-cut at forming one element of the above “local concerns” (or indeed probably of the top, or Provincial, level) could well be: “Reduce demonstrated innumeracy among high school graduates from 53% to 25% by the year 2020 using existing resources.”
Notably absent from the above is funding. Education results do not depend upon finances, and indeed in prominent cases the most expensive systems are the lowest performers.
To sum up: the education system needs overhaul from stem to gudgeon: when will we start?
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