More Influencers, Less Powerbrokers

The capacity for citizen involvement in governance is increasing – a development that allows school trustees to wield real influence.

School boards and trustees need to care about governance.

This is because school trustees are certain to be at the centre of major changes in the way citizens engage with issues and interact with the government.

If the building blocks of governance are representative government, elected or appointed governors, and the act of governing, then the mortar is how they interact in the political and public policy world. Key questions are where and what is the relative authority and responsibility amongst the three building blocks, and how do those relationships help and/or hinder public education?

Trustees and School Districts can be effective modern governors in a new role of public policy influencers. As an elected representative, a school trustee, even without conventional political power, still has the opportunity to exert influence on the government on policies that affect the public education system.

School boards were originally set up to deal with the educational needs of specific communities with defined political boundaries. But more and more, public education is becoming the concern of communities defined by common interests and concerns, not just geography.

Horizontally networked citizens are finding the vertical structure of conventional governance inadequate to meet their needs. That’s where the ability of school trustees to influence power, rather than exercise it, becomes critical to rethinking governance in the new networked, collaborative world that has been spawned by the internet.

In this world, power is moving to individual citizens, away from the traditional governing institutions. Citizens are no longer satisfied with elected authority being exercised top-down, with decisions made behind closed doors by elites, and then proclaimed to the population. They want a larger, more engaged, and effective role in the design, development, and deployment of governance.

The current low level of voter turnout demonstrates how citizens find conventional governing institutions to be outdated, and increasingly unresponsive to their concerns.

We have to change our model of governance. But to do so is going to take a special kind of leadership. And it is going to take more than just different political or institutional leadership. It will require more and better community based leadership as well. Our conventional representative democracy has served us well for about 150 years, but our society has changed, change that is only moving faster, thanks to technology.

We have to increase our personal and our shared capacity for reengaged citizenship in this new networked world. Our problems, at all levels, have never been more complex, more critical or more confounding.

This is precisely why the role of school boards as influencers, rather than powerbrokers, is critical to creating a more generous and inclusive civic discourse, which in turn will lead to a more authentically democratic, inclusive, and cohesive society.

New internet tools for collaboration and communications can be used to engage ordinary folks and enable less savvy community organizations to be more directly involved and effective in public policy. As this space evolves, school boards and school trustees have an enormous opportunity to be facilitators and stewards of the public knowledge gained by this engagement with governance in public education.

They can, and should, become the facilitators and mediators in the inevitable clash between horizontal networks of like-minded citizens and the vertical structures of command-and-control conventional governing institutions.

Community-based collaborative governance will require skillful political leadership. Someone has to have the listening, interpreting, integration, and articulation skills to capture and communicate the essences of the often-chaotic deliberations and debates of citizens. They must be talented and trusted figures who are well connected in the community.