The editorial Political education (April 30), claims that it is "a charade" to suggest that local school boards have any real control over schools and school budgets. The editorial promotes centralizing control over public schooling with the provincial government, removing school boards' powers to levy local property taxes in support of schools, and funding the costs of schools fully from general, provincial revenues.
The argument for full provincial funding has some support in Manitoba from the likes of the Manitoba Real Estate Association, and slightly more cautious support from the Manitoba Teachers' Society, and has been implemented in other Canadian provinces such as Ontario and British Columbia. However, it was not the approach recommended by a recent Ministry of Education Working Group on Educational Finance made up of representatives from the Manitoba Association of School Trustees, Association of School Superintendents, Association of Manitoba Municipalities, Manitoba Association of School Business Officials, Manitoba Municipal Administrators' Association, and the City of Winnipeg, for whom a guiding principle in funding public education in Manitoba was that a level of local autonomy, which included local taxing authority, was necessary for school boards to meet local community needs.
Manitoba school boards remain among the strongest in the country and public education in Manitoba benefits from this. The political and moral authority that comes with the ability to raise local taxes in support of education is a big part of that strength.
Central to the notion of public schooling in Canada are three touchstones: Public accessibility -- that all children should have equal opportunity to benefit from education; public funding -- that the costs of schooling should be shared fairly across all segments of society; and, public control and accountability -- that decisions about public schooling should be made through public political processes and by people elected to carry out this responsibility. Strong civil democracy requires that all people have the opportunity to participate actively in the important decisions that shape their lives, not simply once every few years in provincial elections, but on an ongoing basis in robust public debates that shape public policy and shape our daily lives. In education, Manitoba school boards play a key role in sustaining that requirement.
Contrary to the editorial's assertion that school boards get in the way of this public scrutiny, it is through school boards that much of this debate and critique currently takes place -- the annual round of school board budget presentations being an obvious and important example.
A related -- perhaps taken for granted -- strength of Canadian public educational decision-making has been the existence of a range of influential partners whose presence require that important educational decisions be preceded by (or at least followed by) substantial public dialogue. This has generally acted to limit unilateral action by provincial governments, and in this regard, the collective voice of school boards in the province, the Manitoba Association of School Trustees (MAST), remains an important part of the public dialogue. What is concerning about the Free Press editorial is that it is, precisely, a perceived lack of ministerial regard for consultation and public debate that is used as the justification for weakening, or doing away with, school boards -- surely this is an argument for defending and strengthening the role of school boards, not for weakening them.
Matters of school programming, school finance and particularly issues of school closure, are fundamentally political -- they are about the adjudication of competing visions of education, of levels of taxation and public service. This calls forth a noble, not self-serving, image of democratic politics, and the editorial does neither politics nor education a service with its superficial criticisms of Finance Minister Greg Selinger -- someone whose credentials regarding local participation in community decision-making are long standing and well established.
The existence of strong school boards allows for democratic politics to take place -- with all the tensions and less-than-perfect messiness that goes with it -- and for public schooling to be stronger for that. Strong school boards are worth defending and they need to be defended in the name of public participation and in the name of quality schools. The Free Press editorial states, as its justification for weakening the powers of local school boards, that this will make it clear to taxpayers and parents who controls their schools and school budgets and provide a clear line of accountability for the cost and quality of education. One should be concerned that "cost" is a bigger priority than the quality of our children's education.
Jon Young is acting dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba. An elaboration of this commentary can be found in School Boards and Education Finance in Manitoba: The Politics of Equity, Access and local Autonomy by D. Henley and J. Young, in The Canadian Journal of Educational Administration and Policy, at http://umanitoba.ca/publications/cjeap/currentissues.html.
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