Randall Denley: Ontario’s complicated, fractured school system is about to get worse

The education minister's multi-part plan includes mandatory exams and tying marks to school attendance. Photo by Luke Hendry /Luke Hendry

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Ontario Education Minister Paul Calandra’s big reform announcement Monday meets the needs of this week, but it’s a lot less clear that it will stand the test of time.

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After spending months criticizing inept trustees and dropping broad hints that their positions could be eliminated altogether, the minister had to do something or look foolish.

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Calandra finessed the situation with a multi-part plan that purports to hold school boards accountable while wisely tacking on a couple of sensible ideas to divert public and media attention from the main point. Mandatory exams and tying marks to school attendance are rational and useful policies, but they have nothing to do with school-board accountability.

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On the central issue of what role trustees should play, Calandra has achieved the near impossible goal of making the province’s byzantine, fractured education structure even more complicated.

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Ontario’s English public, English Catholic and French boards will now operate under different sets of rules. English public trustees will have nothing of consequence to do except to choose the board’s CEO. Catholic trustees will also have a say over denominational matters and a role in local bargaining. French school trustees will continue to run things as they have.

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As much as Calandra might have liked to eliminate trustees, his hands were tied, a fact that has been apparent from the outset of his anti-trustee campaign. French boards have a constitutional right to run their own schools and Catholic boards have a right to control denominational issues. That means Catholic and French trustees are required.

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Given that, it would have been ridiculous to eliminate trustees altogether in the English public boards, but Calandra has come awfully close to it. Public board trustees will still be able to advocate for things, but they have no decision-making power.

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Calandra’s new plan fell short of the off-with-their-heads rhetoric he has been using since last summer, as he mused repeatedly about eliminating trustees. Instead, English public trustees will keep their heads, they just won’t expected to use them.

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Calandra has taken a far harsher approach with those boards already under provincial supervision. Even the new and limited role for trustees is more than Calandra is willing to tolerate in these eight boards. They include most of the province’s largest boards: Toronto’s public and Catholic boards, Ottawa’s public board, and the Thames Valley, Dufferin-Peel Catholic, Peel public, Near North and York Catholic boards.

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“Those boards will remain under supervision for as long as it takes to put them back on the right track,” Calandra told reporters this week.

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That means trustee positions will remain suspended until such time as the province feels that the boards’ finances are under control and reserves have been built up.

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That’s a process that will take years, Calandra says. People can run for the trustee jobs in those boards, but there is no certainty as to when they will get to do the job or get paid for it. Why would anyone bother?