OP-ED: Ontario trustees fail students, time for parent-led school oversight
Sue-Ann Levy writes, "Most trustees are union-backed, and therefore beholden to the ideological rot that pervades the teachers unions."
Author: Sue-Ann Levy
As the school year begins once again in Ontario — with four school boards under provincial supervision — I think it’s time for the province to consider eliminating the position of trustee altogether.
What I mean is making official the steps that were taken back in May to remove trustees from the four boards and place them under the oversight of a provincially-appointed supervisor.
I have seen how trustees operate and most are not in it for the kids.
In all the years I’ve covered education, there have been several things that have been consistent:
Many trustees don’t have kids in the school system and use the position merely as a stepping stone to higher political office. Kathleen Wynne and Olivia Chow come to mind.
Most trustees are union-backed, and therefore beholden to the ideological rot that pervades the teachers unions. Like the unions, they use students as their pawns to further their agenda.
Most trustees have no concept of budgeting or managing a crisis. They are often terribly underqualified for the job.
Far too many trustees don’t understand their role is to act as a board of directors overseeing the administration, not as a group that rubber stamps budget overruns and crazy woke DEI and CRT policies
Because too many trustees in Ontario — particularly at the Toronto District School Board — are desperate to be perceived as woke, any trustee or parent with common sense or who speaks up against the nonsense is bullied, silenced and often sidelined. Weidong Pei at the TDSB has dealt with non-stop bullying from the mostly radical left board.
Far too many voters pay little attention to trustee races and end up voting based on name recognition and not the candidate who has the best interests of children in mind.
Trustees have become an extra layer of fat in Ontario’s education system that perform no added value and are more often than not ill-equipped to oversee a multi-billion corporation.
It’s the perfect time to restructure the governance of education in Ontario with trustees already removed from four of the largest boards in the province and placed under provincial supervision.
Instead of accepting why this might have happened, several trustees on the TDSB have posted their petulance on social media and have attended activist events, proving all the more why they should be canned.
After all, they were told by education minister Paul Calandra way back in May to hand in their laptops and cellphones and leave board oversight to the provincial supervisor.
Tamara Gottlieb of Jewish Educators and Families Association produced a well-researched 19-page report in the past few weeks called End the Crisis in Education: A Plan for Equal Rights and Real Learning.
In it, she proposes that trustees be eliminated and replaced with appointed and qualified boards of directors.
The board of directors should include parent representatives.
”Our system needs qualified individuals and a strong partnership with parents, not politicians using the children as political stepping stones,” she writes.
I agree and Calandra seems to be talking about the idea too.
But as Gottlieb so rightly concludes, talk is cheap.
While the Ford government admits change is needed and is talking about reforms to trustees and governance, she insists they need to match that with real action.
“Will this government move with alacrity to deliver real reform,” she asks.
“Strong words with slow action won’t just kill our schools… they’ll kill our economy and the very fabric of our society.”
Besides, I’m betting that when school starts this week, TDSB parents won’t even miss their trustees.
They’re just that ineffectual.
Privatize all schools, zero boards at all. Make the funding portable to the student, they can go to any school they want. This would force teaching staff and schools to compete for the funding if they wish to survive in a competitive market, and good students would be valuable assets to be nurtured as well. Standardized testing on real world skill sets mandatory and published results required. The strong and relevant will thrive, the woke and wasteful will fail. Specialist schooling would be developed to meet the needs of society naturally as the paying careers will create the spaces by demand, not ideology. The failed students can hope to become trustees or politicians.
They need to get rid of the unions that promote ideological socialist activism into our schools. That is not teaching nor education.
The universities are pushing and indoctrinating and the unions further it under this so-called progressive Conservative government which is heavy on the Progressive and zero on the Conservative. I'm glad one of my kids is already done and the other only has 3 years more in highschool. I fear for the newest generation of kids starting out now when none of the old guard teachers with real standards and education retire.