How Can Accountability Be Increased?

Ultimately, parents and the community, not educators, should be in control of public education.

Why?

Over the course of the last 35 years or so, public education has become less and less accountable to the public. While per-student spending (in constant dollars) was doubling, school boards' financial statements were becoming murkier. While parents' interest in their children's education was growing, the schools were getting less welcoming. While the community was asking more and more questions about the quality of the students' education, the school boards getting better at obscuring the data.

This pattern was repeated over and over again all around the province. Turned loose to run the show with a seemingly-endless flow of money, most boards put up expensive buildings, wrote non-demanding job descriptions, hired hundreds of employees and fended off any challenges to their comfortable existence. They even convinced themselves that they were doing all this for the sake of the students, thereby permitting themselves to become self-righteous about and at variance with politicians' attempts to get control of spending.

Thirty years of carte blanche power has allowed educators to dig very deep trenches and establish strong bulwarks against change. It is going to be hard to reform the educational bureaucracy now, given the well-funded, powerful teachers' unions and school boards that want to protect the status quo. Because most educators are going to resist genuine accountability, it will not be enough just to introduce standards and testing. American public schools, for example, are tested frequently, but the U.S. schools still have most of the same problems as the Ontario schools.

In addition to introducing effective testing in Ontario, it will be necessary to check the power of the education establishment by giving parents real control over their children's schooling. Parents must be able to define the schools' programs and be allowed to choose the school in which they enroll their children.

"Someone must decide which school a student will attend, and someone must decide what the ethos of that school will be. It is not possible for a choice not to be made by someone. And either those choices are to be exercised by the state, or they are to be exercised by parents. Those are the only two options. It seems to me that to side with the state, against the right of parents to choose, is to bring into question the very principles of freedom and democracy which underpin New Zealand, Canada, the United States and all the free countries of the world." (Dr. The Hon. Lockwood Smith, Minister of Education for New Zealand)