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It’s a massive shake-up of the way Ontario’s education system runs, and a long-overdue one as well. The Ford government at Queen’s Park has introduced new legislation tackling everything from teacher training to student performance, trustee roles to the professionals who run school boards day-to-day.

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Despite claims that Education Minister Paul Calandra was looking to scrap the role of school trustees altogether, that isn’t happening. The legislation does look to reduce the number of trustees at some boards, limit their compensation and discretionary spending, and impose limits on their power.

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You could argue that these limits now being imposed on school board trustees were all brought about by their own stupid actions. Failing to act on out-of-control spending, engaging in out-of-control spending themselves, failing to provide proper oversight and not putting student learning at the centre of everything.

Too often over the past many years, trustees have used their positions on school boards to push their own political agendas. At the Ottawa-Carleton District Board a few years ago, trustee infighting made the board unworkable.

Calandra pointed to boards being out of control as one reason he’s changing the role.

Role reduced

“The new role of a trustee will be significantly reduced from what it was before,” the minister said.

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As for why he didn’t move forward with his prefered plan of eliminating all trustees, it came down to the law and consistency. Under the constitution, Catholic and French schools are granted special protection so while he could have eliminated all trustees in English public schools, he couldn’t have done it elsewhere.

“We want to ensure that there is that level of consistency,” Calandra said.

The legislation that Calandra introduced to make these changes also makes changes to the roles of hired school administrators. Instead of having a Director of Education, board will now have a Chief Executive Officer who will report to the board but will take over responsibility for issues like the budget.

The way Calandra describes it, this new CEO role will be focused on delivering steady management for what are very large organizations. The CEO will focus on boards and schools run properly and efficiently.

A newly created role of Chief Education Officer will look after the education side of things. While the board will hire the CEO and the CEO will report to the board, the Chief Education Officer will be hired by the CEO and report to them.

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Filling the so-called gaps

Calandra’s legislation also aims to fill what he calls are gaps in the current curriculum. He’s been hearing from teachers since taking over this role that the curriculum too often just offers broad guidelines on what should be taught, and key elements from course modules to tests has to be provided by the teacher.

“We are looking at, through this legislation, providing consistent resources for our teachers, educational resources for our teachers,” Calandra said. “The teachers are being asked to fill in too many of the blanks when it comes to the delivery of the curriculum.”

The main unions for teachers denounced the changes in the proposed legislation, but that might be because it also takes away responsibility for bargaining with those unions from inexperienced trustees and hands it over to the Council of Directors of Education which will represent those in the CEO roles.

All of this seems pragmatic, none of it is ideologically driven, it seems like common sense reforms to the education system that should have been made a long time ago.

So, while the unions howl, expect most parents, and a good many front-line teachers to be fine with it.

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