A recent Globe and Mail editorial observed: "The trouble with school boards as they exist . . . is that they are somewhat accountable in theory, but barely accountable in practice."⁽¹⁾  Voicing what has become common sentiment within government, and some public quarters, the editorial continued: "All residents may vote for the school board, but hardly any do; these large and barely visible institutions start to look like a little like taxation without representation."⁽²⁾

          The editor's comments, which reflect a simmering public unease about school costs and the accountability of school governance institutions, have not gone unheeded by politicians. Since the early 1990s, provincial governments across Canada have been restructuring school governance systems within their respective jurisdictions. Commenting on this restructuring movement, the Canadian Teachers Federation has accurately observed: "The drastic reduction in the number of units of local government for education has been one of the most dramatic of all changes in Canada's pattern of government. And yet, it has occurred and is continuing with relatively little public concern or debate."⁽³⁾

          Although these initiatives to reduce the numbers of local school boards and, in one province, to eliminate them entirely, are of relatively recent origin, they are certainly not new in their intentions. They simply represent the latest form of a larger century-old movement to reorganize public school governance at local levels and to make boards and their administrative systems more efficient.

          But it is not the history of school consolidation in Canada that this paper wishes to address--that has been treated elsewhere.⁽⁴⁾  Rather, the purpose of this paper is to examine the character of developments in the restructuring movement now underway in Canada.

          The following discussion is divided into three parts. The first part reviews the broad historical context in education and government which has given rise to the restructuring movement. Part two examines the main forms, features, and traits of restructuring initiatives as they are now presenting themselves in provinces from the Atlantic to the Pacific. More specifically, it describes the particular provincial conditions that have produced these organizational changes, the agendas and objectives associated with them, the planning and implementation strategies governments have adopted, and outcomes achieved to date.

          The third part of the discussion is more analytical than descriptive in character. It explores several of the central ideas underlying provincial restructuring efforts, the agendas and implications of restructuring largely unstated in official documents, or what might otherwise be described as restructuring's "sub-text." Attention here is directed toward examining why senior governments have selected school district consolidation, euphemistically known as "restructuring," as the principal instrument for such reform, given that government commands various other legislative and policy tools to bring about efficiency and change. In addition, it suggests why other strategies or approaches have not been chosen? What is it about school district consolidation that has made it so fashionable in the 1990s as a way of demonstrating government's commitment to efficiency and reform? Understanding such questions constitutes an important part of understanding the real character and meaning of current restructuring exercises.

 The Context for Restructuring

Centralization and Decentralization in Historical Context

        The defining moment in Canadian history--and, indeed, the defining moment in the history of Canadian school governance--was Confederation. Passage of the British North America Act in 1867 (renamed in 1982 the Constitution Act, 1867) established Canada as a nation, and set out the legal framework under which public institutions would develop. Section 93 of the BNA Act granted authority over education to the provinces in the following terms:

In and for each province the Legislature may exclusively make laws in relation to education, subject and according to the following provisions:

(1) Nothing in any such Law shall prejudically affect any Right or Privilege with respect to Denominational Schools which any Class of Persons have by Law in the Province at the Union.

           The meaning of this legislation, and the historical context in which it was passed, has been described by various scholars and legal historians. Of these things, Enns has written:

 Having received virtually complete authority in educational matters, the provinces had the theoretical right either to establish or not to establish educational systems. In practice, at the time that these rights were granted, to the provinces, educational systems were already in existence and legislatures could hardly have eliminated them. All provinces have thus enacted legislation dealing with education. Once having activated this power, they have assumed full legal responsibility for education. . . . For various reasons, they chose to implement systems which were partly centralized and partly decentralized. Centralized functions were placed in the administrative charge of departments of education, while decentralized functions were delegated to locally elected or appointed school boards.⁽⁵⁾

Along the same lines, Mackay has observed:

Practically speaking, there are three levels of government in Canada--federal, provincial, and local. In constitutional terms there are only two levels of government; local governments are simply agents of the provincial government. Power is delegated by the province to the local units, such as city councils, and can be taken away. Local government is analogous to the administrative branch of government.⁽⁶⁾  

Similarly, Zuker has noted:

Aside from the limitations of our Constitution with respect to denominational, separate, or dissentient schools and minority language educational rights, the provinces have full authority to determine the educational structure within their boundaries. Provinces have the power to enact laws governing their educational system.⁽⁷⁾

          Historians and others have described divisions of authority in school governance in various ways but have made the same general point, namely that: "School boards are creatures of statute. As such they have only those powers expressly granted them by statute."⁽⁸⁾  In this respect, it is noteworthy that the legal basis for school governance in the United States is similar to that in Canada.⁽⁹⁾

          In summary, then, by granting the provinces authority over education, the British North America Act, hereafter the Constitution Act, 1867, provided the legal basis for the centralization of school governance. Importantly, it also meant that Canada, unlike other Western nations, would remain without a federal education office to direct or coordinate the educational activities taking place in the 10 provinces and two territories that would come to comprise the country.

Centralization, the School and the State in the Nineteenth Century
          Even before Confederation, events were taking place that would, in time, help centralize control of schools in provincial departments of education. The following discussion examines the nature of these events and how they came to influence the shape and character of school governance today.

          The shift from local to provincial control of schooling in Canada was a long and complex historical process that took more than half a century to complete. And, it occurred at different times across the country. For example, it can be fairly said that the school system of Canada West (Ontario) was centralized at the provincial level by 1850, that British Columbia's school system was centralized in 1872, and that the school system in Alberta was centralized by 1892 or, at the latest, by 1901.

         Centralization of school governance and control was a movement animated by many forces--some in and some outside education. Curtis views it as "a key element in nineteenth-century state-building:" Fleming considers it as an expression of liberal politics in the Victorian age; and radical revisionists such as Katz attribute its roots to "prejudice, narrowness, and intellectual limitation.".⁽¹⁰⁾   As the following discussion shows, the centralization of educational power in provincial offices, in effect, was a response to problems of modernization and national identity that had troubled school and social reformers alike for much of the nineteenth century.⁽¹¹⁾ 

        The idea of centralizing school governance, as Child reports, had its earliest origins in the common school movement and the spirit of nationalism that gave rise to the first public schools:   

The common school in the western world was the product of the nation state, and designed to serve the interests of the nation state. All common-school systems tended to be basically similar whether they originated in France, Germany, the United States, Australia, or Ontario. So that all citizens would be trained to serve the nation, it was necessary that schooling be free, universal, and compulsory. National identity required cultural conformity, which in turn required uniformity of teaching methods and curriculum. To ensure unity, schools had to be secular, or, at the very least, non-sectarian, and it was essential, furthermore, that the schools promote social stability. All this could be achieved only if the schools were centrally controlled.⁽¹²⁾

          Opposition to central control at the provincial level, although strong initially in some quarters, eventually receded as perceptions about the value of common schooling grew. The purposes that such schools could accommodate seemed boundless: they could prepare children for the world of work, assimilate the poor and foreign born, civilize society in general, inculcate in their clients a sense of provincial and national identity, and prevent crime, delinquency, and idleness by keeping youngsters off the streets. "The middle classes know," Lord Shaftsbury of England's upper chamber remarked, "that the safety of their lives and property depends upon their having round them a peaceful, happy, and moral population."⁽¹³⁾   In the Victorian era when family, church, and community sometimes seemed unable to provide social stability in the wake of industrialization and urbanization, it became a principal purpose of the public school to ensure this state of social equilibrium by directing children's social as well as intellectual development.⁽¹⁴⁾

          Because schooling was equated with progress, at least in the mid-nineteenth-century liberal mind, the task of redeeming society, or "salvaging the lowest classes," as Houston puts it, "could not be left to chance."⁽¹⁵⁾ Another historian, Lazerson, observes: "Without regular attendance, there would be illiteracy and no moral code, and thus continued social disorganization and criminality. Attendance was necessary, moreover, to justify the increasingly elaborate organizational and training mechanisms that had become central to public education."⁽¹⁶⁾ Accordingly, rules to make school attendance compulsory were introduced in various laws and amendments by provincial governments from the 1870s onward.⁽¹⁷⁾

          Public confidence in the importance of state control, which became a hallmark of the nineteenth century, was expressed in the kinds of educational policies developed at the provincial level. With few exceptions, state authorities prescribed a common, provincially-controlled curriculum, and developed systems in which textbooks were selected and purchased centrally. Provincial authorities, likewise, assumed responsibility for drawing school district boundaries, limiting tax levies, determining criteria to open and close schools, and making provincial grants conditional on the favourable reports of provincial inspectors who patrolled both city and rural schools on behalf of education departments. Under such policies, schooling, which for centuries had been viewed as a parental right and responsibility, became a matter of state interest in less than a generation. Opposition to such control, and to the monopolization of education by the state, was viewed by early school advocates as resistance to social and educational reform and, indeed, to the very notion of national development itself.

Restructuring School Governance in the Twentieth Century
          Since the beginning of the 20th century, provincial authorities in Canada and state governments in the United States have embarked on two broad movements to reshape the face of public school governance and administration within their jurisdictions. The first of these, which began at the turn of the century and continued to the end of the Great War, sought to amalgamate urban schools and school districts as a means of creating new and more efficient organizational structures to bring better order and management to school populations that were doubling every decade as a result of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration.

          A second, and even more eventful, movement to restructure school governance and administration began in the early years of the Great Depression. This movement to consolidate schools and school districts resulted in the closure of tens of thousands of school districts across North America by mid-century. In the United States, alone, the number of school districts has declined 87% in the 20th century, from 117,108 to 15, 367.⁽¹⁸⁾ The restructuring initiatives that marked the post-1930 period were directed principally at redressing the plight of rural schools and, in particular, at broadening tax bases in rural districts through school and district amalgamations.⁽¹⁹⁾ Only through such means, the educational reformers of the day believed, could educational equality for children, and fiscal equity for taxpayers, be achieved in small country settlements.

          Even jurisdictions across the continent that initially proved resistant to these reforms gradually adopted consolidation as an instrument for change by the end of the 1950s and 1960s. Consolidation in Ontario, for example, meant that some 5,700 school districts were reduced to 3,200 in 1964 and, within five years, to 1,670 and, by 1969, to 192, a number only slightly larger than the 169 that exist today. Over roughly the same period of time, consolidation decreased the size of local school governance in Quebec from 1,788 to 189 school boards, from 1,500 to 57 in Manitoba, from 422 to 42 in New Brunswick, from 432 to five in Prince Edward Island, from 270 to 20 in Newfoundland, and from 85 to 22 in Nova Scotia.⁽²⁰⁾   Wholesale consolidation of school districts during the interwar era and after marked the end of the second restructuring movement and ushered in an era of stability in school governance that continued across North America until the 1980s and 1990s.

Post-1980s International Developments
          Although school district restructuring was swept aside as a central issue of educational discussion in Canada during the 1970s, important developments served to refocus attention elsewhere on governance questions. Of particular importance in this regard was the California Supreme Court's ruling in the Serrano v. Priest case which held that it was unconstitutional to base the quality of a child's education on the "wealth of his parents and neighbours."⁽²¹⁾   Following this decision, similar suits, challenging the property basis of public school finance, were filed in many states. In the decade after Serrano, 28 states revised their systems of school finance to reduce disparities among districts, despite a 1973 U. S. Supreme Court ruling that the Texas system, based on local property taxes, was not unconstitutional.⁽²²⁾ Moreover, Serrano accelerated a movement toward greater state control of education, a movement already taking form around numerous calls for school reform and educational "excellence."⁽²³⁾

          Movements toward greater state control over school governance were also manifested in other countries. In 1984, Great Britain's state educational authority established "a new framework for school government" for county, special, and voluntary schools in England and Wales, which effectively re-centralized senior government's authority and, at the same time, decentralized new powers to individual schools.⁽²⁴⁾  This new governance framework greatly reduced the influence of municipal educational authorities by allowing parents and teachers to elect school governors in specific schools.⁽²⁵⁾

          In December, 1995, the British government announced plans to "free all 25,000 state schools" in the two countries from the grip of local authorities, making the governance of such schools similar to that of the 1,000 existing self-governing grant-maintained schools.⁽²⁶⁾   "We want to put power in the hands of the parents and the schools," one government source reported, "this will leave more money for teachers, books, and pupils."⁽²⁷⁾  Under the government's plan, 95% of the schools' operating budgets will devolve to the schools, a sum estimated at an additional 700 million pounds a year. Moreover, to insure that local authorities do not dominate the new "self-governing" schools, the number of local council representatives on governing bodies may be limited by legislation.⁽²⁸⁾

          Equally profound measures were also introduced in New Zealand during the past decade. Prompted by a national economic crisis in the late 1980s, New Zealand greatly curtailed its public sector spending and , as part of this retrenchment process, eliminated school boards in 1989, and replaced trustees with elected councils of parents, teachers, and representatives from business and industry."⁽²⁹⁾   Restructuring began in mid-1987 when the Picot Committee was established to review national education. In its report the following year, the committee recommended that educational reform be centred around three principles: "reorganization of the central state, including a shift from operations to policy as a central focus, devolution of operational activities to school level, and [the creation of] new systems of accountability."⁽³⁰⁾   A key reform element was the establishment of councils exclusively comprised of parents to govern schools. Legislation introduced in 1991 allowed non-parents and business representatives to be elected. Nevertheless, a majority of those who serve on school councils continue to be parents.⁽³¹⁾

Restructuring in the United States
          Important, but less dramatic, efforts to restructure school governance and administration were also evident in the United States during the 1980s. In Iowa, for example, a movement to consolidate school districts gradually emerged out of various "sharing" initiatives between contiguous districts. These initiatives led to decreases in district numbers from 438 to 384 in the post-1985 period.⁽³²⁾   Sharing has consisted principally of arrangements whereby one district provides high school instruction for students in another and, in return, receives junior high school or instruction at other levels for its own students. Football and industrial arts programs have also been shared, making it possible for small adjacent districts to offer programs otherwise unaffordable. Over time, such sharing arrangements have led to joint appointments of superintendents and, in some cases, to district amalgamation. These arrangements have worked because, although many of Iowa's communities are rural, none are "isolated and remote." No community in the state, as one official described it, is located more than "one hour's drive from a modern shopping mall."⁽³³⁾   Amalgamations have prompted some small adjustments to school governance structures, including increasing the size of "consolidated" education boards from five to seven members. Along with Iowa, other states have embarked on similar kinds of restructuring activities.

          District-level restructuring has also had more profound effects. In the wake of shrinking state revenues, school governance and administration in urban school districts has been downsized considerably across the country since the mid-1980s. Chicago remains, perhaps, the most notable example of this restructuring. In 1988, full site-based governance and management was introduced into Chicago's public schools. Since then, each school has been governed by a local school council consisting of one appointed official (the school principal), two elected teachers, four elected parents, and four community representatives, two of whom represent business.⁽³⁴⁾   Councils have been accorded full responsibility for all decisions affecting school financial operations and staffing, including responsibilities for hiring, evaluating, and dismissing principals. This school governance model, however, has been marked by political divisions within councils, as well as the inexperience of council members.⁽³⁵⁾

          Such experimentation has been one response to the financial plight of urban schools. Notwithstanding the fact that urban districts in the United States contain approximately 40% of America's "at risk" children, state revenues for urban districts declined by more than 14% in the 1980s.⁽³⁶⁾   Paralleling this decline in resources has been a general restructuring or, more precisely, reduction in the ranks of central administration. On average, the ratio of teachers per central administrator in the "great cities" rose from 27:1 in 1989-90 to 35:1 in 1992-93, the most recent year for which data are available. In some cities, change in the ratio of teachers to supervisory and other administrative staff has been staggering. In Detroit, for example, the teacher to central office administrator ratio rose from 15:1 to 42:1, in Omaha from 17:1 to 39:1, and, in Chicago, from 39:1 to 91:1.⁽³⁷⁾   In Cincinnati, central office administrative positions have been slashed by 50% through a deliberate downsizing and employee "buyout" program.⁽³⁸⁾

          National and regional movements for educational reform, as well as district and school restructuring efforts, have also spurred state education departments to restructure the "form and function" of their own organizations. One 1994 survey reported that 42 states "have started or have recently completed the reorganization" of state education departments.⁽³⁹⁾   These reorganizations have been prompted by various factors, including "budget and state personnel reductions," governors' orders, and legislative action.⁽⁴⁰⁾   Many state department reorganizations have sought to redefine the way that government education bureaucracies work, most notably by shifting state activities away from traditional regulatory and monitorial roles toward roles that lend greater support and technical assistance to districts. In 18 states, reorganization has meant, among other things, that state personnel now provide "direct services to local school district efforts through . . . field service teams," serve on "local district school improvement teams," and work with "local district staff . . . in the development of standards and assessments."⁽⁴¹⁾

          As in the United States, widespread attention to broad questions of school reform in the 1980s has led Canadian provinces to revisit questions of educational governance in the 1990s. As the following brief summaries of provincial activities illustrate, the motives for restructuring, the contexts for change, and the approaches vary among provincial governments across the country.

Provincial Restructuring Initiatives

Newfoundland and Labrador
          In Newfoundland and Labrador, for example, the recent initiative to restructure school governance has its roots in both a 1992 royal commission report, Our Children, Our Future, and in a 1994 information bulletin from the royal commission implementation team, Adjusting the Course: Restructuring the School System for Educational Excellence, which called for reducing the province's 27 school boards to 10 and delegating greater responsibility for school operations and leadership to the local level.⁽⁴²⁾   The commission's proposal to dissolve denominational education committees has met with stiff church resistance and obliged government to hold a referendum in which 54% of voters endorsed the commission's--and the government's--proposed restructuring. But Newfoundland's restructuring has sought more than to correct small school and school district inefficiencies. It has also attempted to address troublesome economic and social issues concerning declining populations in small settlements, the lack of educational competitiveness among the workforce, and long-standing educational inequalities throughout the province.⁽⁴³⁾

        In explaining the restructuring agenda, the Newfoundland and Labrador government maintains that "structural change is not an end in itself [and that] the purpose of restructuring is to streamline and refocus the system so as to better concentrate on the goal of higher achievement for our students."⁽⁴⁴⁾   As the government defines it: "The purpose of restructuring is to streamline the system to make it easier to attain our basic goal. The most effective structure is a simple one, which minimizes the number of administrative bodies, and facilitates decision-making."⁽⁴⁵⁾   Accordingly, the government has recommended that "school boards should continue to exist, but that the number of boards should be reduced from the existing 27 to "eight to ten regional interdenominational boards, with boundaries aligned with the economic zones identified in the [provinces'] Strategic Economic Plan."⁽⁴⁶⁾   Furthermore that: "All boards should be comprised of ten members elected at large, and up to five others appointed by the denomination, where numbers warrant in a particular region."⁽⁴⁷⁾

          Such change, government suggests, also requires reorganizing the province's education department:

Specifically, there will have to be a shift in emphasis away from direct management of the system towards direction-setting and accountability. . . . [I]t can be expected that the department will refocus its attention, placing emphasis on standards-setting, curriculum development, and monitoring. The department will also retain responsibility for routine functions such as payroll and data base management, which are more efficiently performed by a central agency, and which are required for monitoring system performance. [Also] . . . under the proposed restructuring, the province will assume responsibility for establishing school construction guidelines and standards, as well as for establishing school viability.⁽⁴⁸⁾

Prince Edward Island
          In Prince Edward Island, passage of a new school act, as well as government reforms in the health sector, set the context for questions about the province's school governance system and led to the appointment of a government-convened task force on education, which examined assorted educational issues, including school governance. With the release of the task force's 1993 report, Towards Excellence, the government moved to implement its recommendations. Although Prince Edward Island's five existing school boards were retained, much of their authority was reassigned to a provincial education services commission and to local school councils. School board membership was also reduced from 15 to nine members.⁽⁴⁹⁾   In 1994, the minister scrapped the education services commission, complaining that "it was becoming a costly level of bureaucracy that the education department couldn't afford."⁽⁵⁰⁾   Further consultation with school boards, teachers, parents and the public led government to reduce the number of boards to two English school boards (each with 15 interim trustees), one for the province's east and west region, and one French board with nine trustees.

Nova Scotia
          Nova Scotia's restructuring initiative may be traced back to 1991 when the legislature's select committee on education traveled the province to record Nova Scotians' concerns about education. Public consultations were again held in 1993 while the province's education department was preparing its strategic plan for educational change. In 1994, the education department released a discussion paper, Restructuring Nova Scotia's Education System, which outlined various proposals to address the educational issues identified earlier.⁽⁵¹⁾  In February 1995, the government's white paper, Educational Horizons, was published and outlined the government's intentions.⁽⁵²⁾   In it were proposals to mandate school councils, restructure school boards, harmonize services for Francophone and Acadian school boards, and otherwise develop a more cost-effective and efficient system.⁽⁵³⁾   On June 9, 1995, the education minister announced that 22 school boards would be reduced to a minimum of seven.⁽⁵⁴⁾   Restructuring, as the government defines it, is not designed as a cost-saving exercise but, rather, as a way of directing administration and governance savings into schools, thereby achieving greater educational value for school expenditures. Restructuring, as such, is intended as part of a larger school reform effort.

New Brunswick
          In New Brunswick, the provincial government's restructuring initiative began in 1992, when the province's 42 boards were reorganized into 18, of which 12 were Anglophone and six were Francophone. The government's action was prompted by several factors, including a shrinking resource base and a need for greater financial efficiency. Government also wanted larger and more accountable boards that would focus on governance tasks rather than deciding "where the school bus stops," to quote one department official.⁽⁵⁵⁾   The fact that two-thirds of all trustees in the province were elected by acclamation suggested a high level of public apathy toward school governance as traditionally constituted, as well as a need to involve parents more directly in school affairs. The restructuring initiative was also part of a broader strategy of educational reform originating in the work of a commission on educational excellence. The commission's recommendations raised provincial consciousness about education's economic value to the province and convinced government in 1992 to invest an additional $60 million in schooling.

          New Brunswick's dramatic plan to replace elected school boards with parent councils was reported nationally in the Globe and Mail, on February 23, 1996. In announcing the province's decision to make this change, the province's education minister stated: "This is a significant move towards transferring authority to parents. . . . We feel that we've got to have parents involved at every level. Teachers and schools can only do so much, so this is designed to put more control in the hands of families."⁽⁵⁶⁾   To this, the minister added: "this system will be more democratic than the direct election of school-board trustees."⁽⁵⁷⁾   The province, he continued, has "categorically decided [they are] not doing charter schools . . . [because] they go against the principle of equal opportunity which has served New Brunswick well since 1967."⁽⁵⁸⁾   Part of the government's reform effort also involves reducing the size of the educational bureaucracy. According to the Globe and Mail: "On July 1, 123 regional school-district employees will be laid off, and a further 30 full-time employees in the provincial Department of Education will lose their jobs. New Brunswick's 18 school districts currently employ 469 people."⁽⁵⁹⁾

Quebec
          In Quebec, the province's 149 school boards, each with 17 to 25 unremunerated commissionaires, have so far remained untouched by the effects of a massive restructuring program, although some form of public sector retrenchment is currently anticipated and restructuring is, politically, "on the table," to quote a government source.⁽⁶⁰⁾   Over the past decade, the question of whether to replace religious or confessional boards has surfaced in the province as a major educational issue.⁽⁶¹⁾   Two developments are of note. First, in 1992, the education ministry "eliminated all but one (confessional) regional board."⁽⁶²⁾   Second, a gradual amalgamation of small boards has taken place in recent years and, if a decision is made to replace confessional boards with linguistic boards, further consolidation of the system will occur.

          Various reasons exist for the government to be concerned with reducing educational costs. In 1992, Quebec spent 8.8 % of its gross domestic product (GDP) on education, compared to 7.5% in Ontario, and 7.6% in the Western provinces.⁽⁶³⁾   In comparative terms, "the share of the GDP allocated to education is higher in Quebec than in the rest of Canada as a whole (7.9%) and the United States (7.5%)."⁽⁶⁴⁾   So, too, is school board spending per student higher in relation to per capita GDP in Quebec (26.2%) than in other Canadian regions (23.8%) and the United States (21.7%).⁽⁶⁵⁾   Moreover, due to assorted factors, school board operating expenses increased by 8% in constant dollars between 1989 and 1992.⁽⁶⁶⁾

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Provincial Initiatives Part 2

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