Support your progressive school trustee
Vote for a progressive local trustee. Doing so is an act of resistance to the Ford government intent on riding roughshod over education.
Trustee candidates vs the Tories: backgrounder to the municipal election
Progressive trustee candidates run for office with a vision of well-run schools that meet the needs of their students. But they’re up against a Ford government that has, for eight years, done its best to move that fundamental goal out of reach.
Support trustee candidate Deborah Williams
Deborah Williams, an ETT-endorsed candidate, deserves your support in Ward 7: Toronto St. Paul’s, University Rosedale and Toronto Centre. She is an incumbent candidate who champions transparency and access to that public good we cherish as education.
Fordwatch 3: The saga continues
Forgetting is a basic ingredient in any government’s recipe for holding on to power. That’s why School Magazine has kept a tab on the efforts of this government to act for itself and its friends.
Here is Fordwatch 3 and hopefully there won't be a Fordwatch 4. If you’ve forgotten headlines, stories and details, just click on the Fordwatch links for a reminder.
Updated to September 9, 2026
Here is Fordwatch 3 and hopefully there won't be a Fordwatch 4. If you’ve forgotten headlines, stories and details, just click on the Fordwatch links for a reminder.
Updated to September 9, 2026
TDSB “modernizes” central administration with deep cuts
In the good old days of 2025, the Toronto DSB would have received its Ministry of Education (MOE) grant allocations. Trustees would already have spent time figuring out how to make do with the Tories’ magic shrinking budget. But now that’s all changed under the supervisor Rohit Gupta. Now, the TDSB makes the cuts and then Minister of Education Paul Calandra decides what’s going to happen next.
Teacher shortage myths enable social inequities
The Ontario government is changing teachers’ education from a two year program to one year. This change is largely because there is supposedly a shortage of teachers. But data shows this is not the case.
Bill 101: the burn continues
In part 2 we can see more about how Bill 101 is about politics, not policy. Its lack of reason, rationale or plain common sense demonstrates how the Ford government sets out to solve problems without bothering to understand them.
Bill 101: burning down school boards
Bill 101 has nothing to do with putting students first. 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.
The supervision budget blues
Supervision was supposed to clear up fiscal mismanagement and get recalcitrant school boards on the right page. Right now, it's hard to even find the book as school communities prepare themselves for cuts to staff.
NB: PLEASE LOOK AT THE END OF THIS ARTICLE FOR BREAKING NEWS ABOUT THE POSITION OF TRUSTEES ANNOUNCED JUST AFTER THIS WAS PUBLISHED.
NB: PLEASE LOOK AT THE END OF THIS ARTICLE FOR BREAKING NEWS ABOUT THE POSITION OF TRUSTEES ANNOUNCED JUST AFTER THIS WAS PUBLISHED.
We are all Minneapolis: Schools and teachers on the frontlines of fighting fascism
As 2026 began, the Department of Homeland Security launched Operation Metro Surge, deploying more than 3,000 federal immigration agents to the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area — triple the size of both cities’ police forces. As this issue went to print, the Trump administration announced it was drawing down this occupying force — but the devastation they caused, and the resistance they inspired has become a turning point in the fight against rising fascism in the United States.
Facing the dark tower: educators and the TDSB
Educators and their school communities really must organize and obstruct the increasing and arbitrary misuse of power at the TDSB. We need our local unions who defend their members’ rights. More than ever, we need to bolster them as they defend their schools and education workers from a school board in chaos.
Why is Toronto DSB trying to erase high schools for special needs kids?
The Toronto DSB has cut off enrolment for grades 9 and 10 next year at Heydon Park SS and Eastdale CI. Parents of the vulnerable students who attend these two small schools are worried for the future of their children and they’re angry about it.
Needs of students with disabilities and special education go unmet: A letter to Minister Paul Calandra
I write on behalf of the Toronto District School Board’s Special Education Advisory Committee SEAC. We seek your help for TDSB’s 40,000 students with disabilities/special education needs, because you are now the elected official with ultimate responsibility for TDSB operations while under provincial supervision.
Frontline work without frontline supports: Rethinking educator well-being
When a teenager arrives at school after witnessing a violent incident in their neighbourhood or at home, educators do not get to call “time out.” They help. But it takes a toll and they may well need help themselves.
Basket weaving: Ford and post-secondary funding
The Ford government has made it harder for lower income students to pay for post secondary education, just as Doug Ford himself tells them to stop picking ”basket-weaving courses” when the taxpayers are paying the education tab.
Black history, Black futures: What our students deserve
From our friends at the Chicago Teachers Union:
Too often, the Black Panther Party appears in classrooms only through surface-level discussions of resistance or through pop culture portrayals that reduce the organization to its visual symbolism—black berets, leather jackets, firearms, and a militant image.
Too often, the Black Panther Party appears in classrooms only through surface-level discussions of resistance or through pop culture portrayals that reduce the organization to its visual symbolism—black berets, leather jackets, firearms, and a militant image.
Depoliticizing pedagogies of comfort and instrumentalism
Education is too often reduced to efficiency, training, metrics, and measurable outcomes, while pedagogy is judged less by its intellectual force than by whether it preserves student comfort. This emphasis focuses narrowly on whether students feel uneasy or anxious in response to challenging knowledge.
Power play at Bowmore PS: an exercise in intimidation
The school community at Bowmore PS was looking for support and fair collaboration from the Toronto DSB. What they got was 2 administrators moved, 2 teachers fired and 8 more suspended. The community is in shock.
Mr. Calandra: Return our trustees
The TDSB needs its trustees back. They and colleagues from four other school boards, were shown the door at the end of the 2025 school year. The Board is run by Ministry of Education (MOE)-appointed Rohit Gupta who issues periodic decisions as he keeps the community in the dark.
Education against the storm: A homage to intellectuals who did not survive their time by surrendering to it
Henry Giroux is one of the most formidable intellectuals of our time: a man endowed with a steel-cast mind, disciplined, unsentimental, intolerant of intellectual fraud. His seriousness was never brittle. It was elastic, grounded, dangerous in the best sense—dangerous to complacency, to cynicism, to the rituals of cowardice that pass for professionalism.