Fixing Urban School Boards

Abstract

IN DECEMBER 2006, the minister of education for Nova Scotia, Karen Casey, replaced the Halifax School Board with a single appointed manager, saying that the elected board had been racked by internal division for more than a year. This was the latest in a string of takeovers by provincial governments of large urban school boards in Canada. * In 1985 the British Columbia government replaced the Vancouver School Board with an appointed manager because of the board's refusal to balance its budget. * In 1996 the British Columbia government replaced the board of the North Vancouver School District because of mounting fiscal overruns and the belief that the board lacked leadership and accountability. * In 1999, the Alberta government fired the Calgary Public School Board, with Minister Lyle Oberg saying that the board was dysfunctional because members' personal differences were irreconcilable. * In 2000, the government of Ontario took over the management of three urban boards--Toronto, Ottawa, and Hamilton--because the boards refused to pass balanced budgets within the reduced funding limits provided by the province as part of the government's plan to cut public spending and reduce taxes. In each case, the government appointed a single supervisor to run the affairs of the board. A new government elected in 2003 removed the supervisors and restored the authority of the three boards but continued to have difficulties with large boards balancing their budgets despite substantial increases in funding. In 2006, a sub-urban board in the Toronto area was replaced by an appointed supervisor for about eight months, until its budget was balanced. * In 2006 and 2007, in response to statements from leaders of the Toronto public and Catholic boards that they would be unable to balance their budgets, the minister appointed an assistance to review the state of each board's finances and make recommendations as to how they could produce reasonable balanced budgets. In the case of the Toronto public board, the team recommended a review of governance for the board in light of its ongoing difficulties. These Canadian experiences mirror those in the U.S. and Europe. Urban boards in the U.S. have seen a wide range of interventions in governance, ranging from radical decentralization in Chicago in the 1980s to the replacement of elected boards by boards appointed by mayors in several major cities. In England, the Conservative government abolished the Inner London Education Authority in 1990 and returned authority for education to 11 boroughs. The management of several urban systems in England--Nottingham, Bristol, and Tower Hamlets in London--has been turned over to outside teams over the last decade. Meanwhile, others, such as Manchester, have been struggling even though, in the English system, schools are mainly self-governing and local authorities have relatively little power. And large-city school systems all across Europe are also wrestling with their duties despite widely varying governance arrangements. Why has it been so difficult to create workable governance systems in large urban districts? Given the large numbers of students who attend urban schools--especially poor, immigrant, and minority students--it is especially important that these districts be well run. But so often that seems not to be the case. Big cities combine several kinds of problems that together make the educational challenge very great. Cities are demographically diverse and getting more so. Having a large population of immigrants tends to interrupt the political status quo, as new arrivals seek to find a place in society and a voice in the political process. The same is true of non-immigrant minorities, such as Aboriginal people in Canada or African Americans in the U.S. Canadian cities have often been slow to provide a meaningful role in politics for these new urban residents. Disparities in wealth and social class are also a challenge for cities, which typically contain both the very rich and the very poor, often living quite close to one another. …