Bill 101: Burning Down Ontario School Boards

Public Goods  •  May 8, 2026  •  William Paul

Soon after Education Minister, Paul Calandra dropped Bill 101 Putting Student Achievement First Act, parents met at a Toronto District School Board (TDSB) meeting room to talk about their children’s special needs.

Parent after parent explained dire situations in which their children find themselves: a teenager with hearing loss deemed by the Board insufficiently affected to qualify for special help, a thirteen-year-old who hasn’t attended school since September and has suicidal ideas. Several parents spoke about their fears over the impending closure of two small secondary schools that offer a haven for young people who cannot manage the bustle, noise, and academic demands of large institutions. These are just a handful of the stories.

Trustee Michelle Aarts told the group that the TDSB has outwardly stopped caring for students, something that has become a safety issue.

This is the reality behind the Doug Ford government’s babble about “putting students first.” Bill 101 is about none of that. It’s about stripping local democracy, taking even greater control over what teachers do in the classroom, and running education under the neoliberal creed: if it works in business, it works with people.

Bill 101 – in a Nutshell

In a nutshell, key operations of Bill 101 that apply to public elementary and secondary schools will:

• Set a range of 5 to 12 trustees for each board. Toronto’s board will drop from 22 to 12 trustees despite it having the largest enrolment of students in Canada
  • Pay for trustees will be limited to a maximum of $10,000 per year. Previously, they have earned between $6,000 and $26,000 each year
• Create two new board governance officers
  • The Chief Executive Officer (CEO), who replaces the current Director of Education and must have business qualifications. Trustees may hire the CEO but not fire them.
  • The Chief Education Officer (CEdO), who must have education qualifications and be a member of the Ontario College of Teachers (OCT)
• Put the CEO in charge of developing board budgets with any disagreements between the CEO and trustees referred to the Minister of Education for adjudication
• Change collective bargaining by creating a Council of Ontario Directors of Education (CODE) as the central bargaining agent for all English language school boards
  • CEOs in these boards will ratify central agreements.
  • Local agreements will be ratified by the CEO alone in public boards and ratified by CEOs and trustees in Catholic boards.
• Mandate the use of approved learning materials used by teachers in the classroom
• Bring back written exams for students from Grades 9 – 12
• Make attendance worth part of course marks in secondary school
  • It could be worth 15 percent of the final mark for grades 9 and 10, and 10 percent of the mark for grades 11 and 12
  • Excused absences like illness and “holy days” aren’t counted
• Introduce a condensed 12-month Bachelor of Education programme to be completed over three semesters.

Let’s get out the shovels to dig further…

Missing Rationale

The reasons for upending education are as flimsy as wet cardboard. The Ford government says it wants to improve public accountability and governance, make learning more consistent and modernize public education. It claims, with no substantive explanation, that trustees don’t provide adequate leadership but rather fight amongst themselves. Does the word “Greenbelt” mean anything to these people? After all, it was Ford’s Tories who opened Ontario’s Greenbelt to developer friends eager to build houses on land Ford had promised to protect. Four years later and we’re still waiting for the RCMP report on that scandal.

The same government that wants to open tiny Billy Bishop airport to jets and prefers powerful mayors over city councils blames boards for “financial mismanagement and governance concerns.” This is false. The four school boards it placed under supervision last June had no reports from auditors about financial mismanagement; the reports, in fact, spoke about structural deficits over years that each of them had managed to cover by cutting services and dipping into reserve funds. This is a situation faced by 2/3 of boards across the province.

Yes, there were some really foolish moves by a few trustees, notably the ridiculous $190,000 trip to Italy by some at the Brant Haldimand Catholic DSB to purchase art. The province had the means to deal with that situation. Yet, even that bit of stupidity doesn’t compare with the $275-million of potential income that the Tories gave away in 2019 when they cancelled the surtax on high-income earners. None of Calandra’s beefs with school boards comes even close to the magnitude of his government stopping the public from getting access to records of the premier, cabinet ministers, parliamentary assistants, and their political staff by gutting the Freedom of Information (FOI) system.

What the Ford government has done here is to create a useful crisis. Since it came to power in 2018, school boards have accumulated a loss, due to inflation, of about $1,500 per student. For example, at the Ottawa Carleton DSB, the per-student funding dropped by $560 for 2025-26 alone – the year it was taken over by Ministry of Education (MOE). In the 2026 provincial budget, the Tories have cut education by 3.5 percent despite what they say about throwing billions into it.

If Paul Calandra really wanted to make sure that all the money went to classrooms, he would ensure there was enough in the kitty to put there. He would see to it that MOE adjusts education funding for inflation and covers increases to statutory benefits like Canada Pension and Employment Insurance. He would come out and talk with – not at – school boards to develop a funding model that doesn’t leave them short year after year. But no, there’s nothing in his Bill 101 explainer about that.

Trustees Undermined

The Tories are not big fans of democracy. In 2025, the legislature sat for a grand total of 51 days. Their legislative seats were barely warm after the election of 2018 when the Ford government cut Toronto City Council in half in the midst of a municipal election. Doug Ford is keen on Canada’s “notwithstanding clause,” enabling him to bypass or threaten to override fundamental rights and freedoms to get his legislation enacted. He brought it out to overturn a court ruling against cutting Toronto city council – though it turned out that he didn’t need it. He used it again to limit third-party advertising in 2021 and tried it once more in 2022 to enact back-to-work legislation for underpaid education workers, though he backed down when it looked like he was going to face a general strike over his decision.

Bill 101 is baldly hostile to school-board trustees. With honoraria slashed to a maximum of $10,000 per year, their role will become volunteer work. So, it’s noteworthy how cheap Calandra is being with them. Discretionary expenses are to be limited to “prevent wasteful spending” on “personal electronics and accessories, membership fees in trustee associations” along with costs for “unnecessary conferences or travel.” In the 1990’s, trustees’ pay was set at a maximum of $40,000 per year, something that enabled them to treat their work as a proper job. That all ended with Bill 104, brought in by the Mike Harris Tories, who also set out to degrade the power of local democracy by knocking down the number of boards across Ontario from 124 to 72 and turning wages into honoraria.

Who can afford to be a trustee: to spend the hours of work needed to read reports, sit in endless meetings, and learn endless procedural rules? Who can afford to run an election campaign? Trustees will be limited to those who have the money to bear the cost. If they can’t and don’t run, Calandra already has a solution: The Ministry of Education (MOE) will just appoint trustees. He’s put oversight out of reach for most people except perhaps for those who can attract money from a political-action committee with an interest in maybe opening the way for privatization or charter schools.

Adding insult to injury, Calandra decided to limit the number of elected trustees to between 5 and 12. It’s not clear how MOE will decide which boards get how many trustees, but, on this point, the legislation is bizarre. Currently, the Rainy River DSB has 7 trustees to respond to the community needs of about 2500 students; the Limestone DSB has 9 trustees for about 20 500 kids; and Ottawa Carleton DSB has the same number of trustees for about 76,000. Toronto DSB drops from 22 trustees to 12, who are supposed to be available to support families of 234,000 students- that’s 19,500 kids per trustee. This is what Calandra and his fellow Tories think of equitable representation.

Why even bother? Why not just eliminate this layer of government and hire more $350,000 a-year acquiescent supervisors? Perhaps this was a bridge too far for Doug Ford who might prefer having a semblance of representation in place. It also gives the government someone to scapegoat when things go horribly wrong. If that’s the case, it probably won’t work; MOE will be much more visible in local education. Trustees will be more or less out of the mix, and millions of parents will know where to look when children’s outdoor education, music, arts, sports, and special needs programmes are cut deeper than ever before.

There won’t be enough trustees at ground level able to listen to and advocate for concerns of parents: no one with the time or knowledge to fight for a small school, no one able to push for diversity, equity, and inclusion principles like ensuring that the highest needs schools get extra staffing so that, indeed, student achievement is put first. If parents want advocates, they might as well hire lobbyists. There are plenty of Tory friends and party workers who have set up businesses to get the ear of their colleagues.

What’s Left of Governance

In keeping with its corporatist principles, former directors of education will be replaced by CEOs with business qualifications. CEOs will now truly be the people in charge of school boards. They can be hired by local trustees, but not fired without the Minister’s approval. This, Calandra says, is to prevent “trustee reprisals or dismissals of school board leadership while carrying out their responsibilities,” as happened when he decided to fire the TDSB Director of Education last fall because it was time for a change.

The CEO then appoints the Chief Education Officer (CEdO) with “pedagogical qualifications.” So, what happens when pedagogy conflicts with business? Well, the CEdO answers to the CEO, so it’s clear how that dance will end.

Calandra is keeping trustees’ hands away from the money. It will be up to the CEO to “provide confirmation” of certain trustee decisions such as those with “financial implications.” That covers most of what trustees do. CEOs will also lead budget development. Disputes over this will be referred to MOE. Something not mentioned in Calandra’s explainer is the requirement that a board “obtain the Minister’s approval before acquiring a school site or other land.” More reins in the hand of a government that seems to have missed the fact that boards maintain business departments, run audits, and so on in order to be publicly accountable.

Collective Bargaining in the Hands of CEOs

With Ontario educators’ contracts expiring at the end of August, collective bargaining will be a test for Calandra’s governance revamp. Since 2014, under the School Boards Collective Bargaining Act, there has been a two-tiered system of bargaining with a provincial table represented by associations of school boards and trustees. Local issues have been negotiated with local boards of trustees.

That’s all changed under Bill 101. Now the province will designate a Council of Directors of Education (CODE) as its central bargaining agent. CODE will consist of CEOs from each English-public and Catholic school boards. There’s no mention of school board or trustee organizations, other than Ontario Catholic School Trustees Association being allowed to observe negotiations regarding denominational issues. CEOs in CODE alone will ratify central agreements. Local CEOs alone will ratify local agreements for English Public Boards. Catholic board trustees will, jointly with their CEOs, ratify local agreements.

With CEOs’ hands on the financial throttles of school boards, there’s no doubt who is in the driver’s seat for negotiating collective agreements. An OSSTF member, who asked not to be identified since he was commenting on an issue not yet discussed, made the point that these changes will probably lead to more aggressive collective bargaining aims. Key players have changed, resulting in likely modifications to the bargaining mandates of the CEOs on the government side of the table. Interests have shifted now that trustees are out of the way. The Ford government’s interest away from equity and stability is obvious in the way it has cut funding to boards while placing them under greater centralized control.

As NDP MPP Chris Glover summed up, Bill 101 is nothing more than the latest aggressive attempt “at undermining the public system to make a market for private schools.”

Attendance: Rewards for Showing Up

Paul Calandra says that poor attendance has a “negative impact on student achievement,” and that’s the extent of his analysis of a troubling problem. His Ministry will make attendance worth 15 percent of the final mark for Grades 9 and 10 and 10 percent for students in grade 11 and 12. There is nothing in his explainer giving us any rationale for this move. It’s just reactionary: kids who come to school get marks for just being there and absorbing learning through the ether; kids who don’t are out of luck. It is fundamental Ford Toryism.

Low attendance is complicated. Before Calandra introduced Bill 101, the Toronto Star drew data from Ontario School Information System (OnSIS) to describe a serious and growing problem. In secondary schools, the number of young people attending class at least 90 percent of the time has dropped considerably since the 2018-19 school year. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, 59.7 percent of secondary students attended class at east 90 percent of the time. After the pandemic, by 2024-25, attendance dropped overall in secondary school to 40.2 percent.

Yet, as University of Ottawa professor Jess Whitley et al¹ noted in an article in June 2025, while Canadian media is focusing on negative impacts of chronic absenteeism and poor mental health, there is just one Canadian study examining school attendance problems of kids from Kindergarten to grade 12. They argue that despite the concerns, we don’t know much about chronic absenteeism: how it is defined, its impact on communities, or the success of the different intervention strategies used by school boards to keep kids coming to school. They call for greater collaboration between researchers and those who operate schools to learn more about low school attendance.

Calandra said that regulations regarding extra marks for attendance will make allowances for special-needs kids, those attending sporting events, and others with health concerns. He should add a lot more to that. As Whitley observes in another article, “school attendance problems often serve as a ‘canary in the coal mine’ for schools and mental health agencies, signaling that children are struggling at school, at home, or in the community…” Bill 101 has nothing to say about avoiding school because of anxieties over issues like bullying and/or struggling academically. What about students who deal with social emotional problems – one of the 67 500 kids awaiting treatment for autism? How will Calandra rule on issues like lack of access to education for people with disabilities? What accommodations will he introduce for newcomers and lower-income students who may need to work part-time to help support their families struggling with higher food and housing costs? Why, asked Whitley in an interview, did a government wanting kids to improve school attendance make the school climate survey optional? It’s something that provides information about how safe it is to be there.

Boards have been so squeezed by the Ford government that they’ve been forced to cut the very supports and programmes that help keep kids coming to school. For example, in its first budget under Ford for 2019-20, the Toronto DSB cut student-support services, music instructors, school budgets, and outdoor education. By 2025, the year it was placed under supervision, it cut outdoor education again and charged fees for continuing education and use of school pools. In January, the TDSB supervisor removed class-size caps of a maximum of 32 students for grades 4 to 8. A 2024 Ontario Auditor General report noted that, while student referrals for mental health supports increased by 71 percent at the TDSB between 2017- 2023, staff positions for counsellors, social, and youth workers increased by only 41 percent. Education cuts exacerbate the problems that lead to poor attendance.

Interaction of constraints is fundamental to why kids stay away from school. For instance, a 14-year-old arrives in a larger and completely different setting when they go to high school. Some fit in; others struggle to make friends, finish work, and so on. Maybe circumstances are such that they need to stay home sometimes and look after a younger sibling. Whatever the roadblock, marks start to slide, they feel more isolated, find other reasons to avoid going to school, and continue in this vicious cycle. Under Calandra’s plan, even if they turn in good work, kids won’t get the 10-15 percent bonus mark promised for just showing up.

Calandra’s attendance plan is so poorly thought through that it looks like he’s decided teenagers who don’t come to school are slackers who need to be taught a lesson – not individuals who have much more complex situations. He’s using a hammer where he needs a magnifying glass.

Politically Approved Learning Resources

Because teachers are “forced” to “source learning resources that are not always aligned with the curriculum,” Calandra is clamping down and mandating use of “approved learning resources,” though teachers would still have “flexibility” to use supplementary materials. He speaks of “inappropriate content” used in classrooms, so it’s not hard to speculate where he’s heading with this new rule.

He wants to centralize control over learning resources: what is “appropriate”, what may be “flexible.” The professional judgement of local educators is replaced by the Ministry of Education (MOE). So, it’s not just the books and resources but also who chooses them that matters. The regulations attached to Bill 101 will count for a lot, since Calandra is vague about what he means.

Look at what he and his fellow Tories have done to hamper enquiry. Weeks after the Ford government was elected in June 2018, it cancelled the K-12 update of content and resources for Indigenous studies. More recently, after hearing of a Hamilton Wentworth DSB memo reminding principals to consider commencement ceremonies from “an anti-oppressive/anti-racist/anti-colonial lens,” Calandra declared that ceremonies are to be apolitical. They are “… not an appropriate forum for organizers or administrators to express political views or promote personal or institutional positions, or engage in divisive or contentious issues of any kind.” It wasn’t as though the board was calling on schools to do anything extraordinary – just follow well-accepted principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Calandra’s message was “don’t do that.”

We’ll need to watch out for the learning resources and books deemed to be appropriate or inappropriate. Last September, when the Alberta government ordered school boards to remove what it described as “sexually explicit” material, some of them went overboard to comply, including in lists of banned novels The Handmaid’s Tale, 1984, Brave New World, and The Colour Purple, to name a few. Pen America reports that book banning is “rampant” in the US – just part of school operations, especially in places like Florida, Texas, and Tennessee. As Timothy Messer-Kruse reports in Counterpunch, Missouri is threatening to halve the budget of any school district found to be teaching “prohibited concepts.” He adds that Ohio and New Hampshire have both passed legislation in honour of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk who was murdered last September. In New Hampshire, the CHARLIE act, prohibiting schools from introducing certain “critical theories” is an acronym for “Countering Hate And Revolution Leftist Indoctrination in Education Act.”

Given Ford’s antipathy for teachers who take their students to rallies supporting the Indigenous people of Grassy Narrows, Calandra looks to be following a dangerous but well-trodden path in his effort to centralize decisions about learning resources. Truth is malleable.

High Stakes Exams

Despite his government’s efforts to undermine education, Calandra wants more consistency and clarity in assessing learning at secondary schools across the province. Mandatory exams written on official exam days will make that happen, he claims. Clarity is just what’s missing from this section of Bill 101. Like so much else in the bill, it is muddy and will rely entirely on unpredictable regulations to be written by MOE bureaucrats.

If final exams were used as a tool to help teachers understand what key concepts haven’t been well-understood by students, they could have some value. If little was riding on them, they wouldn’t include a key variable in testing: stress.

That is what you introduce when you pile all the important information supposedly learned in a year onto one assessment. Newfoundland got rid of final exams in 2023 partly because of the needless anxiety associated with them. Do kids really need the extra stress of cramming for a high-stakes final exam? Surely Calandra must understand the connection between this and avoiding school. Exams are not going to improve attendance problems.

Arguments in favour of final exams tend to support their ability to measure learning in a different way, offer a snapshot of what students have grasped, solidify memorized facts – in particular, essential information in subjects like Science and Math where future learning is built on certain key facts.

But there is much more utility in assessing that understanding through short but frequent assignments like tests, projects, and so on. If kids don’t do well on a test, teachers have time to correct their teaching methods. By collecting more information over time, a teacher can get a broader and fairer picture of a young person’s work and where they need help if they are to benefit from Calandra’s stated intention to “Put Student Achievement First.”

High stakes final exams raise serious questions. Is cramming or long-term retention a useful indicator of learning? Some people understand overarching concepts of subjects perfectly well but need to check specific facts and details.

Who will set the exams? If this becomes MOE’s job, control over what to learn gets even farther away from local boards. Will teachers’ jobs now be focused on exam prep, since so much is riding on them?

Given the implications of high marks on exams and getting into post-secondary schools after writing exams, kids whose families can afford tutoring will have an unmistakeable advantage.

What about validity and reliability of such consequential final exams? Validity refers to the ability of an assessment to shed light on what it purports to measure. Does the exam accurately measure the concepts it claims to test? Do its questions reflect those concepts? Reliability refers to the test’s ability to be consistent with the students who take it. This is where factors like test-taking stress, physical and mental health, number of questions, and rubrics for marking enter the picture and muddy it.

Is assessment of learning even a problem in Ontario? Again, there is nothing in Calandra’s explainer outlining concerns regarding assessment of learning in secondary schools, so why fix it? The answer to that question is pretty straightforward. The changes listed in Bill 101 make one thing clear: Calandra and the Ford government have no intention whatsoever to fix the serious problems of public education in the province. The bill is a basket of red herrings meant to distract the public from this fact while the Tories centralize pedagogy, slash local representation and oversight, and put the onus on young people to pull up their socks or suffer. It is government for the winners, not “for the people.” •

1. Whitley, J. McBrearty, N. Roger, M.A. Smith, J.D, “The Current State of School Attendance Research and Data in Canada,” Education Sciences. 2025, 15 (8), 964.