SNOBELEN: Considering options in provincial takeover of school boards

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About a zillion years ago, I greatly benefited from the wisdom of a man who had been in the management consulting business for several decades. Over that time, he worked with organizations from across the business spectrum as he developed two simple, universal rules of management.

The first rule is that management systems have an expiry date. After about a decade, even the most brilliant management structures become slow and unwieldy as layers of rules and regulations attach to the original design.

You might assume, given this universal truth, that people would be vigilant about avoiding widening mandates and growing regulations. You might also expect that management systems would be viewed as temporary constructs.

Not so much. It turns out that organizations have an immune system that resists change until some crisis makes reorganization inevitable.

Texas troubadour James McMurtry called the people caught in these change cycles “corporate reload refugees.” While often painful, restructurings are inevitable. Avoiding the disruption of change is a bad strategy.

Unfortunately, the public sector is perfectly designed to avoid change. Change is risky and the public sector is masterful at avoiding failure. Neil Young might have thought it better to burn out than to rust, but public servants will take rust every time.

I was thinking about all of this as Ontario Education Minister Paul Calandra peers at the rusty construct of school boards. Calandra has put four school boards under supervision as the result of “fiscal mismanagement.”

Included are the Ottawa-Carleton public board, Toronto’s Catholic board, Thames Valley’s public board and, oddly, the Dufferin-Peel Catholic board.

Dufferin-Peel’s inclusion in the list of boards incapable of managing a budget stands out as proof that leadership matters.

Three decades ago, I thought it was one of the better-managed boards in the province.

The most notorious board in the province is, undoubtedly, the Toronto District School Board. TDSB has long-proven expertise in championing currently popular social issues (see renaming schools named for notable Canadians like Dundas, Ryerson, and Sir John A. Macdonald), plus a reluctance to make the tough choices required to meet a budget.

School boards date back to a time when education was the purview of counties. Local taxes paid for teachers and the curriculum was designed and implemented at the county level. Obviously, the system required locally elected representation.

But times change. Having over 170 different school curriculums made no sense. Funding based on local resources created a system of rich and poor schools. Negotiating teacher contracts at the local level left poor counties scrambling to meet the pay set by richer communities. The model was unsustainable.

Over time, the province assumed more ownership of schools, creating province-wide curriculum and testing and paying for education from provincial taxes. However, the provincial government left the school board system in place with little real responsibility.

This led to absurd theatre as school boards remained the employer of teachers, while the real meat of contracts was negotiated at the provincial level. It did, however, leave boards plenty of time to contemplate diversity, equity and the renaming of schools.

Now, Calandra is confronted with a dysfunctional, antiquated governance system. Should he continue to manage the problem with temporary supervision or finally get rid of school boards in favour of a combination of provincial oversight and parental input?

As he contemplates the options, Calandra would be well advised to consider my old friend’s second universal rule about management: No one likes to be managed.