Centralizing school boards will erode democracy: Aristotle Foundation report

Local school boards are dying. Across Canada, power has been stripped away from parents and communities and handed to distant, bloated bureaucracies.

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Local school boards are dying. Across Canada, power has been stripped away from parents and communities and handed to distant, bloated bureaucracies. The result? A massive decline in accountability and public trust in our education system.

In a recent report, the Aristotle Foundation argues that decades of centralization have hollowed out local education democracy, leaving school governance distant from families, teachers, and students

Since the 1960s, provincial governments have consolidated thousands of small, community-based school boards into a few large regional authorities. In Ontario alone, the number of boards plummeted from about 3,700 in 1961 to just 72 today. Similar reductions occurred across the country, despite relatively stable student enrolment. The result is larger bureaucracies with layered administration and limited local accountability.

Trustees were once central figures in community decision-making but now operate with tightly constrained powers. They no longer control taxation, curriculum, or key spending. Many boards are expected to follow a corporate governance model that discourages hands-on involvement, confusing trustees’ roles and fuelling public frustration. Repeated scandals and financial mismanagement have further eroded confidence, prompting governments to consider abolishing elected trustees altogether.

The Aristotle Foundation warns that eliminating trustees without replacing local democratic structures risks deepening the problem. Nova Scotia’s 2018 decision to abolish English-language school boards serves as a cautionary example. Parents felt sidelined, teachers felt disempowered, and no meaningful local governance mechanism replaced the boards.

The issue isn’t the existence of elected trustees but the scale and structure of governance itself. Regional boards have become too large to represent local interests effectively. In some provinces, a single board now oversees more than 100,000 students, making meaningful community engagement unrealistic.

School-based management, a model pioneered in Edmonton in the 1970s, is one alternative. Under this approach, authority over budgets and programming is devolved to individual schools, with principals, teachers, and parents playing central roles. Although Canada largely abandoned the model, it later gained international traction in countries such as New Zealand.

The proposed solution is a made-in-Canada governance model that replaces regional boards with autonomous school councils, supported by shared service organizations for administrative functions. For the Aristotle Foundation, restoring democratic accountability requires bringing decision-making back to local communities where education actually happens.