Bill 101: the burn continues
Part 2
In this section we can see 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.
Attendance
Paul Calandra is playing politics with attendance. He says that poor attendance has a “negative impact on student achievement,” and that’s it. 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 a hint of 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. This is fundamental Ford Toryism.
It’s worrisome that kids are not attending school regularly, though the context for this is not so clear. 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 school, 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.
Percentage of students attending class about 90 percent of the time:
| Grade | 2018-19 | 2024-25 |
| 9 | 66% | 45.7% |
| 10 | 59.8% | 40.9% |
| 11 | 54.8% | 38.7% |
| 12 | 47.1% | 33.3% |
But what do we really understand about the issue? 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 the contribution to it of 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 be reasonable, that allowances will be made for special needs kids, those attending sporting events and others with health concerns. He should add a lot more to the list of Ministry-acceptable reasons for absence. 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 will he do about kids who are excluded from school because a school board – due to lack of funding – can’t provide the support required to enable a young person to attend class? 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 have had to cut the very supports and programmes that help keep kids to keep 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 only exacerbate the problems that lead to poor attendance.
Interaction of issues is fundamental to any consideration about kids being absent from school: 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 this vicious cycle continues. 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.
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 who chooses them that matters. The regulations attached to Bill 101 will count for a lot, since Calandra is vague about what he means.
But look at what he and his fellow Tories have done. 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/antiracist/anticolonial 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 learning resources and books will be deemed appropriate. 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 U.S. – 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 health and wellbeing of 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
Calandra wants to have more consistent assessment routines in secondary schools across the province, more clarity in how final marks are determined and mandatory exams written on official exam days. Improved clarity is a good thing, but is missing from this section of Bill 101. Like so much else in the bill, it is muddy and will rely entirely on the unpredictable regulations to be written by MOE bureaucrats.
Final exams are not entirely a bad idea; it all depends on their purpose. If they are used as a tool to help teachers understand what key concepts haven’t been well-understood by students, they could have some value. If they were presented that way, without the formality of a fixed date and time, it might remove one of the key confounding variables 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. Tests, for example, put the onus on teaching: if kids don’t do well on a test, teachers have time to correct their methods. By collecting a lot of 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 desire 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. The question is always what are you testing: rote memorization or understanding? They aren’t the same thing.
Given the implications of getting into post-secondary schools after writing exams, kids whose families can afford tutoring will have an unmistakeable advantage.
Who will set the exams? If this become 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?
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. For example, 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 these two articles make one thing clear: Calandra and the Ford government have no intention whatsoever to fix the serious problems of public education in the province. Bill 101 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.”
William Paul is a retired special education teacher, consultant and principal
- Whitley, J. McBrearty, N. Roger, M.A. Smith, J.DThe Current State of School Attendance Research and Data in Canada, Education Sciences.2025, 15(8), 964; https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/15/8/964