Below please find the deputation I made to the TDSB Board of Trustees
-Monday, January 26th, 2015
To the Committee of the Whole,
Toronto District School Board
Monday, January 26, 2015
I want to touch on three major issues raised by Margaret Wilson’s recent review of the Toronto District School Board.
The first issue is the subject of trustee-bureaucratic relationships or “the climate of fear” we have been told pervades the board.
This is perhaps the silliest dimension of Margaret Wilson’s report, and we should dismiss it out of hand, were it not for all the media hysteria it promotes.
In personal terms what goes on between trustees and board bureaucrats is simply par for the course in any large political institution. Anyone who has spent a moment at City Hall or Queen’s Park or close to our Parliament in Ottawa knows that the kind of complaints we hear from Board individuals about bullying and confrontation come up every day. If the Board’s power had not been so seriously diminished by our most recent Conservative and Liberal governments – had the Board much more substantial issues to deal with – we’d have heard a lot less about people getting their noses out of joint because someone was rude or pushy. There would be other, more important, things to talk about.
Frankly, when I hear such timid complaints from Board officials, it seems to me like one more bureaucratic manoeuvre to keep trustees away from any real decision-making and to increase the government-media pile-up on local boards. We should keep in mind that these senior officials are seasoned political animals, with thick hides. They didn’t get to their positions by playing nice. The TDSB is a tough decision-making arena. As much as anyone, Margaret Wilson should remember this.
We should not only expect confrontation from our trustees, we should also encourage it; that’s how genuine policy questions get public attention.
The second issue is that of trustee irresponsibility on financial matters.
This issue isn’t, perhaps, as silly as the first. But it’s a close second.
The financial issues Wilson and the Toronto media have been raising are peanuts, when you think of the size of the Board budget. Of course, whatever irregularities there are should be cleared up. But are we really comparing this situation with the billions of dollars wasted by our provincial government on Private-Public Partnerships, gas plan closures, ORNGE, e-heath and welfare payment screw-ups.
Surely, not.
The third issue I want to raise is of genuine importance. This is the issue of trustee power.
The main conclusion of Margaret Wilson’s review is that TDSB trustees should have even less power than they currently have, which Ms. Wilson manages, ironically, to categorize as a present-day “privilege.”
For Margaret Wilson, the Harris government’s centralization of educational power in the province (and particularly in the amalgamation of Metro Toronto’s school boards) sets up the basis for her recommendations for the structure of educational decision-making in the city. She’s pleased to support a situation where “curriculum, funding and negotiations now rest primarily with the province.”
She pays no attention to the enormously valuable role trustees have played in Ontario education for two hundred years.
Let me say this as clearly as I can: TDSB trustees should have a lot more power than they currently have, including the infrastructure necessary (offices, assistants, resources) to reach out effectively to their communities and which, at the same time, allow their communities to keep on top of their activities.
Most school trustees come to this board committed to being “full time” trustees as much as they can manage on their very limited salaries. Margaret Wilson may sneer at this term, but it reflects trustee seriousness about being representatives of their communities and fighting effectively for their concerns.
And there are some very serious concerns.
From Margaret Wilson’s report, you’d think our parent communities and our teaching staff were just delighted with what’s been happening at Queen’s Park these last couple of decades.
I was brought up in Rexdale and I teach there, and let me tell you both our teachers and our parents are deeply disturbed by the current direction of provincial education policy:
They don’t like the destructive financial cutbacks we’ve experienced and they don’t like the intensive micromanaging the Ministry now engages in, undercutting any serious local democracy in our schools.
They don’t like what can only be described as the insane fragmentation of the curriculum into literally hundreds of dead expectations. Instead they want broad curriculum outlines that let teachers engage with their students and communities to make the material real.
They don’t like the standardized tests that police these outcomes. Instead, they want assessment and future help based on what our students actually do in their work – what they do in their reading and writing, their history and social science projects, their math and their science.
They don’t want their kids bottom-streamed, which continues apace at this board however much criticism has been raised about the practice.
They don’t like the distance so many local administrators have from their communities and want more say in the choosing of local principals and vice-principals.
They also don’t want their local community schools sold off, because they don’t meet impossibly tight government guidelines on minimum enrolment and the Board needs money because of provincial cutbacks. They want their schools ready for the next influx of children coming in not too many years and they want their use as community hubs to be expanded and enriched.
So they think the trustees have a big role to play – in pushing back this destructive government and bureaucratic agenda, in bringing parent, student, and community voices to the Board and in building a much stronger and caring school system.
Trustees aren’t supposed to mindlessly “trust” this administration, as Margaret Wilson and the government imagines they should. They’re supposed to make sure administrators are doing the job our parent communities want them to do. And they’re supposed to be tough about it.
They are, in other words, supposed to care about our children and to act with the best interests of their communities in mind.
Margaret Wilson and our government want them to be cyphers. I can only hope everyone in this room will stand up against that prescription.
Thank you,
Nigel Barriffe
