TDSB needs a new kind of leader

Since its inception in 1998, the Toronto District School Board has gone through six directors while developing a reputation not for education excellence, but for dysfunctional leadership. Now as it looks for yet another new director to turn things around, the board needs to take a hard look at itself. If it is really going to live up to its potential, the board does not just need a new leader, but an entirely new way of doing things.

First, it cannot be overstated how low morale has become in many parts of the TDSB. The “culture of fear” that was first identified in a report by Julian Falconer, and more recently in another report by Margaret Wilson, permeates the entire organization. Contrary to what was stated in the Wilson report, building this culture of fear was not just the work of a few trustees or the director Donna Quan (whom she later implicated), but has become part of the institutional fabric of the TDSB. How else to explain the revelation from just this past April that the board had secretly placed a hidden surveillance camera inside the office of one of its own school principals?

So if creating this dysfunction wasn’t just the work of one person, can just one person now radically change the way that an entire organization of over 36,000 people operates?  (more...)

TDSB needs a new kind of leader

Your friendly neo-fascist political machine at your service:

Woman With Ties to White Supremacists Represents School for Blacks and Hispanics

The old kind of leader