opinion

Ontario's Education Minister Paul Calandra visits students at École Catholique Pape-François school in Stouffville, Ont., in May.

Paul W. Bennett is the director of the Schoolhouse Institute, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and author of The State of the System: A Reality Check on Canada’s Schools.

The long-standing pillar of local democracy in Canadian education – the elected school board – is crumbling. In Atlantic Canada, locally elected school boards with trustees have been swept away. In Quebec, anglophone school boards were gutted. In Manitoba, trustees narrowly escaped elimination. And in Ontario, their decline has reached a terminal stage – and Education Minister Paul Calandra is now poised to wield the axe.

The question is no longer whether trustees

See Full Page