School Board Research examines the governance of Ontario’s 72 district school boards. The project reviews the policies and reports each board publishes, compares them with the provincial policy to which they respond, and presents the results in a public report card. It draws on two established traditions in public administration: social accountability and the citizen report card.
Social Accountability
Accountability in Ontario’s public education system has traditionally run upward. Schools report to boards, boards report to the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry reports to the Legislature. These arrangements are supported by conventional mechanisms of accountability: legislative oversight, audit, administrative rules and legal procedure.
Social accountability describes a complementary route. The World Bank defines it as “an approach toward building accountability that relies on civic engagement, i.e., in which it is ordinary citizens and/or civil society organizations that participate directly or indirectly in exacting accountability” (Malena et al., 2004, Abstract). Its instruments include participatory budgeting, public expenditure tracking, independent monitoring of public services and citizen report cards. Malena et al. (2004) present these instruments as complements to conventional accountability mechanisms, not substitutes for them. This project adopts the same position. It provides a public and comparable view of board governance alongside the reporting that already flows to the Ministry.
Social accountability depends on information that is both public and usable. The policies of Ontario’s school boards are public, but they are spread across 72 websites and written chiefly for administrative audiences. Comparing them across boards takes time and familiarity with provincial policy that few members of the public have. The project reviews them consistently and reports the results in plain language, so that parents, taxpayers and trustees are better placed to take part in oversight of the system they fund.
The Citizen Report Card
The citizen report card originated in Bangalore, India. In 1993, Samuel Paul and a small advisory group adapted the private-sector practice of client satisfaction surveys to public services. They surveyed middle-income and low-income households about the performance of the city’s public service agencies and published the results (Bhatnagar et al., 2003). The group later established the Public Affairs Centre, which repeated the exercise in subsequent years.
An independent assessment prepared for the World Bank found that the agencies concerned had responded to the report cards and that service delivery improved between rounds (Ravindra, 2004). The Bangalore experience suggests that public, comparable information can influence institutional practice, particularly when it is published repeatedly and put to use by the public.
The approach has since been adapted to education. India’s Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) is a citizen-led assessment of children’s foundational learning. It has been conducted every year since 2005 and reports results for every rural district in the country (Banerji et al., 2013).
Report Cards in Canadian Education
In Canada, the best-known school report card is the Fraser Institute’s annual ranking of schools. That model has attracted sustained criticism. Raptis (2012) documents how rankings based on test results placed a disproportionate burden on low-ranking schools, which were typically in lower-income communities, as families moved higher-achieving children to higher-ranked schools. In 2010, Victoria’s Times Colonist ceased publishing the rankings.
The Board Report Card is designed with that critique in mind, and differs from school rankings in three respects:
- Unit of review. The unit of review is the school board. No assessment is made of individual schools, principals or teachers.
- Governance. The central question is what each board has adopted and published, not how its students perform.
- Context, not ranking. EQAO results and enrolment data are presented as context for each board, not as the basis for a ranking.
Contents of the Board Report Card
For each board, the Board Report Card brings together:
- a review of board policy against provincial policy on the Code of Conduct (PPM 128), bullying prevention and intervention (PPM 144) and accessibility (the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005 and the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation);
- Director of Education compensation, drawn from public salary disclosure and from each board’s executive compensation program under the Broader Public Sector Executive Compensation Act, 2014; and
- selected EQAO results and enrolment figures, compiled from public sources.
Results are published as each component is completed.
Approach
Each board is reviewed against the same written criteria. The criteria are drawn from the provincial policy text and fixed before any board is reviewed, and they are applied to every board in the same manner. A document counts only if it can be reached from the board’s public website by an ordinary route, as a parent would find it.
Given the volume of material, large language models are used to assist in reading and sorting documents. Results are checked against the source document, under a documented review protocol, before publication. Source documents are archived at the time of review, so that each result can be traced to the text on which it rests. Each published result carries the version of the criteria and the date on which it was produced.
Nature of the Findings
The findings describe published documents assessed against stated criteria. They are not legal opinions, and they are not determinations by any regulator, auditor or court.
Responses and Corrections
Each board’s entry in the Board Report Card links to a response form. Through it, a board may ask for a review, ask for reassessment following a policy update, or provide feedback. Members of the public may raise concerns by the same route. Corrections are made publicly.
Access to Methods
The methods and assessment criteria are available on request, consistent with the Government of Canada’s work in the open by default standard.
References
Scholarly sources
Banerji, R., Bhattacharjea, S., & Wadhwa, W. (2013). The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER). Research in Comparative and International Education, 8(3), 387–396. https://doi.org/10.2304/rcie.2013.8.3.387
Bhatnagar, D., Dewan, A., Moreno Torres, M., & Kanungo, P. (2003). Citizens’ report cards on public services: Bangalore, India (Empowerment case study). World Bank.
Malena, C., Forster, R., & Singh, J. (2004). Social accountability: An introduction to the concept and emerging practice (Social Development Paper No. 76). World Bank.
Raptis, H. (2012). Ending the reign of the Fraser Institute’s school rankings. Canadian Journal of Education, 35(1), 187–201.
Ravindra, A. (2004). An assessment of the impact of Bangalore citizen report cards on the performance of public agencies (ECD Working Paper Series No. 12). World Bank Operations Evaluation Department.
Governing instruments
Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005, S.O. 2005, c. 11
Integrated Accessibility Standards, O. Reg. 191/11
Broader Public Sector Executive Compensation Act, 2014, S.O. 2014, c. 13, Sched. 1
Policy/Program Memorandum 128: The Provincial Code of Conduct and School Board Codes of Conduct
Policy/Program Memorandum 144: Bullying Prevention and Intervention