Pat Cochrane is chairman of the seven-member Calgary Board of Ed. (Photo courtesy of Calgary Board of Education)

In the summer of 1999, Calgary's public board of education had become so dysfunctional — "an embarrassment," in the words of the education minister at the time — that the province took away its powers and put it under trusteeship.

The school board and the province had been warring for years over funding and the growth of independent "charter schools." But more embarrassing still, its members had taken to warring among themselves, even to the point of sending catty little notes about each other during public meetings, which the local media found out about and reported.

A few months later, a new slate of public trustees was elected, among them Pat Cochrane, at the time a member of an advocacy group for public education. These new trustees decided to clean the slate and start fresh with a new set of "core values" and a commitment to measuring student achievement on a number of levels, from academics to citizenship.

The result was that the Conference Board of Canada selected the Calgary Board of Education recently as the overall winner of its national awards for good governance, beating out such well-known names as the Royal Bank of Canada and the YMCA of Greater Toronto.

Cochrane is now chairman of the seven-member Calgary Board of Ed. She spoke to CBC.ca's Robert Sheppard about the lessons learned.

What exactly is this award about?

It's for governance and governance is about how you lead and structure your organization and how you are able to focus on the task at hand.

This award had much had to do with the turnaround in the board, right?

Yes, I believe that was what captured them about our situation. In 1999, the previous board of trustees had been dismissed by the education minister of the province. He said they were dysfunctional and were unable to focus on the students. After that a byelection was called and a number of us came in and said 'OK, something really serious happened here and we need to learn how to refocus ourselves.' That was in November 1999, just a few months after the previous board had been dismissed.

The previous board had done a bit of work on governance and what model to follow. But we said it's really time to bear down and get serious. We really wanted to focus on why we exist. Why are we here, what are our values? Then write them down, declare them and learn how to measure them.

How important is the measuring?

That's one of the different and more innovative ways we're approaching this. We're a school system so we do 'readin', writin' and 'rithmetic.' But in some ways those are much easier to measure than the softer skills.

We felt character is very important, for example. We want students to act morally and understand right from wrong. Citizenship is very important in a public school system. And these are our citizens of tomorrow. They need to understand their rights and responsibilities and act accordingly.

We have an approach on personal development as well, on all of the skills that humans need to be successful. Students need to know how to organize themselves, how to behave properly and be punctual. Those are harder to measure than whether someone is reading at a Grade 3 level or doing the appropriate math.

How do you measure these soft skills?

Actually, in quite a few ways. The citizenship one is interesting because you can measure it through activity. Are our kids involved in volunteering? Are they involved in reaching out to impoverished people in our city, in our nation, across the world?

And we're hoping to do some longitudinal studies about that in the future. Our kids are mostly under 18. But we'd like to track them at some point and see if they vote, for example.

Did you have to devise the standards yourselves?

There's a little bit out there but not a lot. So our administration has had to do a lot of work. A lot of it is going to rely on the teacher in the classroom doing the assessment.

For academic assessment, we rely primarily on the provincial achievement tests and the diploma exam because our province has a really strong curriculum and really good measurements. And on those, we've had a good five-year success rate of improving every year. So on those we can say 'Yeah, there's convincing data that shows we have been successful.'

Has all this testing been well-accepted by teachers and others in the system?

We've had to figure it out as we go along. We certainly haven't got it perfect yet but we're getting better. You don't want to layer on teachers more work, and more reporting back. So what we've tried to do is build on things that were already happening and then build on that data.

It didn't all happen all at once. But that's how life is. We started with a really deep commitment to focus on our core purposes as a board, which is making sure that each student is successful in his or her life and learning and whatever work that they undertake.

So we can always pull back to that core purpose to say 'Here's the work we have to do to make that better.' It also allows you to always assess your own work and ask 'Did we get where we want to go, did we do it right?'

Is this the same group of trustees since 1999?

Three of the seven now have been on the board since 1999. There have been three boards since then, but the core group has been there.

Initially, there was a bit of concern that we were being too restrictive in some areas and that we were tying ourselves too much to one process. But one of the really good things about this form of governance is that it does clearly define what trustees do, what the board does, what the administrators do. When you have clear roles, it makes it easier for everyone.

In 1999, the Calgary board was almost in open war with the province over funding. There were huge growth issues then and even more now. Has that relationship changed?

It is more workable today. That was another decision we made in 1999, which was to say the province is our partner in education. It is our principal funder and we need to work together.

We've never been shy about speaking out but it's incredibly important for us to have a good working relationship with the province because it benefits our students.

Have other school boards taken a page from your book?

There are other boards that use a similar governance model. I'm not aware of any other boards around us that are as focused as we are in what they are doing.

What are the lessons for other school boards?

I think one of the real keys from this approach for any organization is to be able to pull back and say clearly, 'What are the core values on which you base your decision?' And if you can really clearly delineate those and write them down and hold yourself to them, then you can pursue them in a really strong way.

We don't exist for our staff, we don't exist for our parents, though they are a really strong component. We exist for our students. That's how we focus our decision-making.

Do these core values come up like a mantra at your meetings?

Absolutely. They really do. Because we're all human beings, we can get distracted by the areas we might be more interested in or the groups we might belong to. But this technique is really good because you can always pull yourselves up to the high level.

You can say 'Wait a minute, we're getting stuck in detail here. What's the high level decision that we need to make here, based on our principles and our values?'

We're just people, but when we pull back to those higher values it's really helpful.

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