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However, shortly after the transfer decision was announced, the Ford government the management of several Ontario school boards, including the TDSB. Last week, the provincially-appointed supervisor overturned the TDSB transfer decision and decided that Sketchley would remain at Rosedale Heights for his final year.

It’s ironic that a provincially-appointed supervisor was more responsive to the concerns of parents and students than the locally elected trustees. This certainly makes short work of the claim that school trustees represent the wishes of parents.

However, even if the provincially-appointed supervisor corrects some of the TDSB’s most egregious , this does not necessarily lead to a long-term fix. Replacing bureaucratic school boards with provincial bureaucracies is not the way to make schools more responsive to community needs. The only way to do that is to truly empower parents.

Perhaps an analogy will make this point clear.

Imagine a grocery store in a small town with overpriced products, limited selection and terrible customer service. Replacing the manager might improve things temporarily, but if it remains the only grocery store in town, the store will start acting like a monopoly again by charging higher prices and providing poor service. The best way to solve this problem is to ensure new grocery stores (and entrepreneurs, more generally) are free to compete with the existing store. To accomplish this, government should remove any barriers to new firms entering the grocery market and allow existing or potential competitors to expand. This creates an incentive for all stores to better pay attention to what customers want.

By the same token, when parents have no choice but to send their children to the neighbourhood public school, they have little influence over what happens in that school. Yes, Ontario parents could opt for the Catholic school system, but in Ontario there’s not much difference between Catholic schools and public schools. That’s why the Ford government took over the ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½ Catholic District School Board at the same time it took over the TDSB. Both boards had similar problems.

As a first step, the Ontario government should do what five other provinces do — provide to parents who choose to send their children to independent schools. By allowing provincial funding to follow students to schools of their choice, it becomes possible for lower and middle-income parents to choose schools that will meet their children’s needs. This way, independent schools would not be an option that’s currently largely only available to wealthier parents.

In addition, if the Ford government is feeling particularly bold, it should get rid of large school boards entirely. There’s no need for the many layers of bureaucracy in these huge boards. Think of how much money could be saved if the money used for the various superintendents, directors and consultants was repurposed down into schools and classrooms.

To be clear, this is not about replacing elected school trustees with appointed provincial administrators. Rather, the government should dismantle school boards entirely, and elected community members (who serve on a volunteer basis) should govern each school. This would make schools more directly accountable to parents, particularly since those parents would have other options available to them.

Under this system, no school governing council would forcibly transfer a popular and successful principal out of the school he founded in the last year of his career because parents would have a direct say over who runs the school their children attend.

The solution to Ontario’s education problem is not to substitute one bureaucracy with another bureaucracy. Instead, it’s time to replace unaccountable bureaucrats with genuine parental choices.