Barbara Patrocinio

Reporter

As Ontario once again weighs the future of its school boards, from Education Minister Paul Calandra’s warnings to the latest legislative pushes toward centralization, it’s easy to forget just how many times the province has torn up its governance model and started again.

Ontario has never stopped reorganizing its school boards. For 180 years, the province has expanded local control, then reined it in, then expanded it again. Every few decades, the pendulum changes direction, usually after a political flashpoint or a crisis of confidence.

Education historian Paul W. Bennett, whose work traces more than a century of reforms, says Ontario’s system has always been “a battleground between local autonomy and provincial control.”

That tension runs through every era, starting in the late 1800s when school boards were still hyper-local, unevenly funded, and sometimes led by neighbours with little training.

“These early boards reflected their communities,” Bennett said, “but they also reproduced the inequalities between them.”

Today’s argument about whether school boards are still useful is simply the newest chapter in a very old fight.

Ontario’s public education system began as a messy compromise. Egerton Ryerson, a Canadian educator who was a prominent contributor to the design of the Canadian public school system, imagined a province-wide network of state-supported schools offering equal opportunity.

But when the first laws were written, local school sections, tiny districts run by locally elected trustees, became the backbone of the system.

Trustees could decide almost everything: where the schoolhouse went, who taught there, how to raise money, even what materials were used to heat the classroom. Reformers routinely complained that this degree of local control undermined what Ryerson hoped to build.

In many rural places, the school section became the heart of community identity. That attachment would make future reforms difficult.

By the early 20th century, Ontario had thousands of school boards, many serving a single one-room schoolhouse. As towns grew and secondary schools expanded, the mismatch became clearer. Inspectors and politicians pushed for more standardization, but rural Ontario resisted.

“The province gradually realized that “dozens of tiny boards couldn’t sustain consistent programming, let alone modern infrastructure,” said Dr. Robert S. Brown of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), who has studied the evolution of school governance.

Still, reform moved incrementally, and the school board map remained fragmented well into the post-war years.

By the early 1960s, some schools still lacked indoor plumbing or proper heating. Teachers taught multiple grades at once. That was the backdrop for the biggest shakeup Ontario had seen since Confederation.

When John Robarts became premier, he brought with him years of frustration from his time as education minister. The province’s economic ambitions were expanding, but the education system was stuck in an earlier era. Robarts and his successor at the ministry, William Davis, believed change was unavoidable.

University of Toronto leadership and educational change professor Carol Campbell said these years marked “a complete modernization of the province’s education architecture.”

“This period was Ontario’s great consolidation,” Campbell says. “The province believed larger boards could deliver both quality and equity.” In practice, that meant dissolving dozens of longstanding local boards and replacing them with county and regional structures.

Davis’s 1964 legislation, Bill 54, collapsed more than 1,800 rural school boards into 423 township-based ones.

It also meant centralizing decisions that had once been left to communities. Campbell describes the 1960s as “the moment Ontario’s education system became truly provincial.”

The reaction was explosive, with trustees accusing Queen’s Park of dictatorship.

But Robarts held firm, and he announced that the province would move to county-wide boards.

In 1969, the number of school boards dropped from more than 1,300 to fewer than 200.

Nearly 30 years later, Ontario went through another upheaval. If Robarts and Davis changed the map, premier Mike Harris changed the power structure.

In 1997, his government amalgamated boards again, reducing them to 72. This time, however, the province also removed boards’ ability to raise taxes.

After more than a century in which local trustees controlled local tax rates, school boards no longer had the fiscal autonomy that had defined them.

Union leaders and trustees described it as a “centralization revolution.”

Tensions boiled over in 2002, when the province took over the Toronto District School Board. Boards remained elected, but control increasingly rested at Queen’s Park.

Bennett, who was a trustee during this period, said the Harris reforms fundamentally changed who could serve.

“There were many trustees who made this a full-time job,” he recalled. “In Toronto and Ottawa, they had offices, they were there all the time. But when Harris cut the stipends, he made it impossible to do this as full-time work.”

“I was making $22,500, one-third tax-free, which worked out to about $30,000,” he said. “Then suddenly it was going to be $9,000. I didn’t seek reelection. I wasn’t going to work forty hours a week for $9,000.”

The result, he argues, reshaped who stayed in the system.

“You know who was left?” Bennett said. “People who’d been there 30 years, people in it for the social interactions, lots of former teachers who wanted to stay connected. The role changed, and so did the people who filled it.”

The shift helped fuel consolidation, he says, because “trustees became more likely to support the very centralization their professional networks were advocating for.”

At the same time, authority over curriculum and student evaluation became increasingly provincial.

“From 1997 onward, everything moved upward,” Bennett said. “Testing, accountability, curriculum, all of it. That further reduced the role of elected boards.”

“There was a movement to stop calling them trustees,” he said. “If you’re a trustee, you represent the public. They were reclassified as board members, accountable to the superintendent and the board. Trustee disappeared from the regulations.”

The early 2000s were marked by a tug-of-war over who really governed education. While boards continued to administer schools, the province took a stronger hand in almost everything: testing, bargaining, curriculum, funding transparency.

Brown says these decades revealed “the limits of size.”

“Bigger boards didn’t automatically mean stronger community engagement,” he said.

Trustees now found themselves navigating both community pressures and provincial directives. Meanwhile, high-profile scandals and censure battles raised uncomfortable questions about the effectiveness of school board governance. Were boards crucial democratic institutions, or just holdovers from a different time?

Since taking office, the Ford government has repeatedly signalled it wants to streamline or reshape school boards. Many decisions, from remote learning rules to hiring practices to pandemic safety, have been centralized.

More recently, Education Minister Calandra said that some boards have failed to meet expectations, hinting at new oversight tools and possible restructuring.

Ontario’s new education law is meant to make it easier for the province to take control of school boards when they present governance issues.

Calandra tabled and passed the Supporting Children and Students Act, Bill 33.

“I've made it very clear from the very first day I took office that I was not going to allow the system to remain the same, that I was going to do everything in my power to put school boards back on track,” Calandra said.

Five school boards were already under provincial control when it passed.

So who should run the province’s schools? How much power should local boards have? And are school boards still necessary or just a remaining lawyer of bureaucracy remaining from a different time?

Bennett supports parts of the reform — particularly the new requirement that parents receive timely responses.

“Cutting out intermediaries is a great idea,” Bennett said. “Right now, parents get bounced from teacher to principal to superintendent to trustee and back again. You won’t get a response for five days. This is a huge step forward.”

“I like what they’ve started,” he said. “But the question is: will the next phase continue improving transparency and accountability? That’s what has gone wrong in other provinces.”

Bennett argues that the fiercest defenders of boards tend to be insiders.

“Ask who wants to keep boards exactly as they are,” he said. “I’ll bet they’re somehow connected to the apparatus. People talk about boards as essential democratic institutions, but the system no longer functions that way.”

“If you believe in democracy, be skeptical that saving boards in their current form will make any difference,” he said. “The nexus of democracy should be where education actually happens, between students, parents, and teachers.”

The answers to these questions, Brown says, depends on who you are talking to.

Bennett says that everyone saying school boards are essential, don't know what they are talking about. "They are talking about an apparatus that may have existed at one time, but no longer functions that way or there hangers-on," he said.

The fact that the recent bill the government put forward states that family and students centres will be in place, will improve efficiency and remove an extra lawyer of bureaucracy, he said.

So as Ontario again wrestles with the future of local governance in education, the history behind the current structure offers a clear reminder that the system we know today has been rebuilt many times before.

Inside the long revolutions that transformed Ontario school boards, and the reforms that might be ahead

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