By Silla Tauler
Recently, the Ontario government passed legislation that makes substantial changes to the ways that English-language school boards function in the province. This legislation is part of a series of reforms that the provincial Conservatives have undertaken to change school board governance, which promises a host of disruptions to the publicly funded education system.
The first salvo came in November with Bill 33, the Supporting Children and Students Act. This legislation centralizes the authority of the Minister of Education to take direct control of publicly funded school boards and sideline locally elected trustees for a host of new reasons. The impacts of existing takeovers in nine school boards includes the closure of numerous special education programs that supported students with the most serious needs in our system, and layoffs for hundreds of teaching, administrative and other staff in some of Ontario’s largest school districts.
Then came Bill 101, the Putting Student Achievement First Act which was passed on May 7. This new piece of legislation came with a flurry of announcements which cynically pander to working people’s frustration with the school system’s perceived lack of rigour and failure to prepare students adequately for “success” within (read submission to) the norms of liberal capitalism.
This bill changes the way high school courses are assessed by adding an attendance and participation mark to every earned credit and banning the practice, which some boards had previously adopted, of removing exams from certain grades.
Furthering the Ministry’s attempts to more directly manage, and promote privatization within public education, the announced reforms suggest the province intends to create a suite of standardized materials to be used in the instruction of courses in Ontario. The Ministry of Education is already in the habit of giving money to private third-party vendors to provide online night school to high school students, including an existing set of course offerings available through TVO. Through these programs, online vendors receive public funds to offer credit courses virtually, which translates to a loss of funding for neighbourhood schools and the decimation of enriching programming at every high school in the province.
Addressing governance directly and the impact these proposed changes have on local democracy, Bill 101 sets a hard limit of twelve trustees for every publicly funded school board in the province. Notably, this only impacts the Toronto District School Board as it is the only district with more than twelve prior to its provincial takeover last year.
The legislation also creates two new senior administrative posts at every English-language school board, a chief executive officer (CEO) and chief education officer (CEdO). From the announcement, the CEO will be required to have some background and qualifications from the business sector, and they will not be required to have any formal training or background in education. The CEdO will be appointed by the CEO if they do not have education training themselves to manage the pedagogical aspects of the school board’s operations.
This means that school boards in Ontario will go from having one director of education as the most senior administrator in each board, to two director level positions with competing and overlapping missions at every English-language board in the province.
The role of locally elected trustees is also severely limited under this new reform. They will no longer serve the function of approving policy and budgetary proposals made by senior administrators, but will now be left as a largely consultative body whose only recourse is to appeal to the Minister of Education if they cannot resolve their disagreement with the CEO. The Minister will then assume the position of ruling over these disagreements and decide whether to side with the appointed CEO or the elected trustees.
All of this is the background to the next round of bargaining, as teachers’ and education workers’ contracts expire in August.
Under the previous system, unions representing all education workers would divide their bargaining between central and local tables to decide the terms of their contracts. The central table typically handled all monetary issues; simultaneously, local tables at each school board bargained terms without monetary consequences attached to them. Central table issues include salaries, benefits contributions, class size language, changes to the funding formula for schools, etc., while local bargaining might include matters like break schedules, supervisions and language around preparation time.
Typically, elected trustees represented management at both tables. They would delegate teams from among themselves to work with the unions in trying to resolve disagreements and resist making minor concessions with oversight provided by the Ministry of Education and the Ontario Treasury Board.
The new system creates a confused patchwork of bargaining agents. For English-language secular boards, all bargaining will be done with the CEOs and their provincial body, the Council of Ontario Directors of Education (CODE). Workers in an English Catholic school board, will be bargaining with their CEO and CODE for monetary issues, but their trustees will remain in charge of bargaining on topics which impact their religious community. French-language boards will retain the status quo and negotiate with elected trustees as before – this is seemingly an effort to avoid a constitutional challenge over language rights, but it also potentially splits the French-language unions further from their English-language counterparts.
Details of all these changes remain unresolved – while the legislation has passed, the regulations which implement it remain undefined. It remains to be seen whether the province intends to use this to delay bargaining, introduce a suite of fully privatized resources and accompanying exams, or otherwise undermine and confuse the public about the erosion of public assets due to decades of chronic underfunding.
In any case, with both municipal elections and education bargaining on the horizon later this year, a strong labour-community alliance needs to be built now to defend public education and local democracy.
[Photo of education rally on April 29, 2026: ETFO]
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