In a controversial attempt to improve student outcomes, Nova Scotia’s government announced last week it will eliminate its seven elected regional school boards and replace them with a government-appointed advisory council.

It’s not the first time someone thought scrapping elected school boards would fix the education system’s problems, real or imagined. New Brunswick eliminated its school boards about 20 years ago but restored them four years later. In 2001, Prince Edward Island moved to a single appointed board.

It’s true that school boards are at the bottom of the political food chain: elected bodies with a lot of responsibilities, low pay, and little power. They have multiple legislated obligations like balancing budgets, providing education programs to all school-aged kids, hiring and monitoring their superintendents, opening and closing schools, and so on.

In B.C., school boards can be dismissed by the minister of education anytime the minister decides it’s in the public interest to do so, giving them little autonomy.

They’re accountable to voters who get a chance to weigh in at the polls every four years (in B.C.’s case, at least; terms vary from province to province). In smaller rural districts, it’s not unusual for trustees to get into office by acclamation, term after term after term, a point that Avis Glaze—who conducted Nova Scotia’s education review and recommended scrapping elected boards—suggests is evidence of voter apathy. She has a point, although the same could be said for small-town city councils.

In larger urban districts, however, school-board elections are relatively competitive. In Vancouver’s case, some school-board candidates (ahem) get as many or more votes than most city councillors (although they draw from a larger electoral area, as residents in the UBC area vote for school board but not council).

B.C.’s school act says school boards are responsible for improving student achievement. Trustees generally try to make the best decisions possible, within rigid financial, legislative, and contractual constraints. The financial constraints are the toughest, by far. For the past couple of decades in B.C., trustees often struggled to make the least painful decisions instead of having the money to make improvements.

Think about the dreadful decisions B.C. boards had to make under the last government: closing schools; cutting school librarians, special-education teachers, and music programs; extending spring break and lengthening school days to save money; cutting custodial time and money for basic supplies; turning down the heat in the winter; and cutting programs that give vulnerable young students extra support in their earliest years. That’s hardly the way to improve student outcomes, but the problem wasn’t the school boards themselves—it was at the provincial level.

In Nova Scotia’s case, the education minister commissioned its “administrative review” in response to its students’ lagging performance on national and international assessments. I’m not convinced the test scores necessarily indicated a real problem; rather, they may be a reflection of demographics and a range of other, more nuanced, factors.

Although I’m all for looking at ways to improve student outcomes, ditching elected school boards seems like an unlikely way to do that. The provinces that have tried that route, Nova Scotia and PEI, have even poorer student performance on national and international tests than does Nova Scotia. The provinces that tend to score highest—Alberta, Ontario, B.C., and Quebec—all have elected boards. Go figure.

Elected school boards are the worst governance model, except for all the others

I admit I’ve doubted the value of school boards from time to time. Some of them make poor decisions and don’t do much to try to improve student outcomes or support teachers who work in classrooms. Some mostly rubber-stamp management recommendations and don’t advocate for the needs of their districts.

I’m old enough to remember when local boards could increase their funding by raising local taxes and they did their own bargaining with their unions. Now the province controls the purse strings and the employer side of bargaining, leaving boards with a diminished role.

In my experience, voters expect school trustees to be advocates for students and communities and to run interference when governments pressure boards to make cuts and close schools. They want trustees to make the case for funding to build new schools, upgrade or replace seismically unsafe ones, and for all the programs and services students need or want.

They want trustees to make sure students have access to special-education supports and program options like French immersion, Mandarin bilingual, and specialty mini school, regardless of what’s going on at the provincial level.

Budget decision were the hardest

As a trustee, I found budget decisions the hardest. Each spring, government tells school boards how much money they’ll get on a per-student basis for the next school year, and district managers draw up balanced budget proposals, factoring in any funds they think can be generated locally through international student revenues and building rentals and leases.

When there isn’t enough to pay for inflationary and other cost increases—which it never was when I was in office—it means making cuts to something or other. When you do that year after year, there’s no fat left to trim and you’re cutting into the muscle and bones of the operation. Those decisions can be brutal.

Being a B.C. school trustee often made me feel like I was government’s unwilling puppet, doing its dirty work for them instead of serving the public. I’m pretty sure that’s why the last government kept us around: to make unpopular decisions for which they didn’t want to be held responsible.

Why bother with elected boards?

Despite all the frustrations, pressures, and inability to always do what’s best for students, we’d be worse off without elected school boards.

If we hadn’t been there through the last eight years of B.C. Liberal government, I have no doubt several VSB schools would have been closed and public-school land would have been sold. When we refused to approve more budget cuts in the spring of 2016, then-education minister Mike Bernier suggested we sell part of the Kingsgate Mall site to make up the funding shortfall.

It was a stupid and possibly illegal idea. The B.C. School Act (wisely) doesn’t allow proceeds from land sales to be used for operating costs. It would have been a foolish business decision, regardless, as the site is locked into a 99-year lease, reducing its market value. It gets more valuable by the year, and it still belongs to the public via the school board. The annual lease payments fund VSB programs. I hope that revenue stream is available for generations to come and that the land stays in public hands and available for public purposes long after we’re all gone.

As a school board, we literally held our ground.

We scraped money together some years to prevent the worst of the cuts, even draining what little cash reserves we had. We refused to get rid of elementary school librarians while other districts did—they’re more important than ever in the “fake news” age where democracy’s survival depends on an educated electorate that knows how the discern fact from propaganda and outright lies.

We managed to keep band-and-strings programs going in several elementary schools long after other districts cut theirs or went to a full user-pay model. After we were fired, the appointed trustee who replaced us approved a budget that dealt the much-loved program its death blow. That’s an indication of what getting rid of elected boards looks like. It also looks like cutting five intake classes of French immersion, with no public consultation, as the VSB did for this school year, while there was no elected board in place to prevent it. Which isn’t to say a weak board wouldn’t have let that happen—not all boards are effective, and voters need to choose wisely.

Without the VSB’s elected trustees to push ahead with B.C.’s most progressive sexual-orientation and gender-identity policy, I doubt the rest of the province and provincial government would have followed suit the way they did.

Yes, elected school boards matter.

Dysfunctional or democratic?

Does good governance mean getting along and does disagreement equal dysfunction? Superficial media coverage often mistakes debate for dysfunction and disagreement as bad governance. Nothing could be further from the truth. That’s the kind of thinking that puts elected boards most at risk of being viewed as irrelevant and unnecessary.

During my three successful runs for the VSB, I heard from a lot of voters on doorsteps, at public meetings, by phone, email, social media and pretty well everywhere I went for eight years. Time and time again, they told me they wanted trustees to stand up to government and push back against more cuts to schools and to demand better for kids. I promised to do that, and that sometimes meant engaging in disputes with a government like the one Christy Clark ran. It was unavoidable, and voters expected it.

Meanwhile, the B.C. School Trustees Association’s (BCSTA) took a somewhat different approach. In December 2014, government quietly announced devastating funding changes to adult-education programs run by B.C. school boards and colleges. The changes meant we’d have to cut our programs and start charging $550 per course for anyone who’d graduated from high school but needed to upgrade their courses to get into postsecondary programs. It affected thousands of students and led to a huge drop in enrollment.

School boards found out about it by seeing the news release or news reports. Instead of vigorously protesting the move and calling out government for its heavy-handed, unilateral decision, the following day BCSTA president Teresa Rezansoff cheerfully signed “a co-governance memorandum of understanding” with then minster Peter Fassbender and posed for photos, with nary a word about the adult-education cuts announced the day before.

Are school boards their own worst enemies?

Although the BCSTA’s grin-and-bear-it approach was probably the best way to stay on the last government’s good side, it was a lousy way to win public support. If boards just politely go along with whatever government wants them to do, even if it’s bad for students, then, really, why should the public see any value in them?

B.C. school boards’ work will be easier under the present government than it was under the last, but if boards want to stay relevant they need to be willing to make strong public cases about what’s best for students and their communities. They need to defend the democratic process and respect the fact that disagreement around a board table, or between levels of government, is a sign of functioning democracy.

One of the biggest achievements—perhaps the biggest—of the VSB of my day was helping make Vancouver voters aware of what the provincial government was really doing to education. We weren’t content to just do government’s dirty work. When Vancouver voters ran Christy Clark out of her Point Grey seat in 2013, we knew we were probably having an impact. That was also when former education minister Margaret MacDiarmid lost her Vancouver-Fairview seat to the NDP’s George Heyman, despite the Liberals winning a provincial majority.

Education was a bigger campaign issue in 2017 than I can remember it being in a long time. We know how that turned out. The ouster of Christy Clark’s government, and whatever role the allegedly “dysfunctional” VSB played, was perhaps the board’s most important accomplishment of all in terms of creating better opportunities for student success.

I suspect the cure for what, if anything, actually ails Nova Scotia’s public-education system has nothing to do with its governance model. The fight for democratically elected boards will continue, as it should, and boards need to make sure their work stays relevant and focused. I look forward to seeing how it plays out in Nova Scotia and what lessons it will provide for the rest of us.

My prediction is they’ll learn that school boards, like democracy, are terrible systems of government, except, of course, for all the rest.