Public Education Roundup, February 2026

Woke madness continues but a few encouraging signs have appeared

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By Igor Stravinsky (Teacher, commentator)

We’re at the midway point of the 2025 - 2026 school year and school boards have not failed to surprise anyone by continuing to promote clearly ineffective, ideologically-based policies to the detriment of student learning and wellbeing, not to mention demonstrating general incompetence in their managerial roles. This is all to be expected when hiring and promotion is done based on loyalty and ideological conformity, not competence.

But first some good news: Former Waterloo Region District School Board teacher Carolyn Burjoski has been vindicated in her four-year battle with the WRDSB over a presentation she made during a Board meeting in 2022. The presentation was in response to books the Board had approved for elementary school libraries which promoted gender ideology and contained sexual content which Burjoski contended were not age appropriate.

Burjoski was stopped mid-presentation by the Board Chair Scott Piatowski, who claimed that her submissions were a violation of the Ontario Human Rights Code. Burjoski subsequently filed suit against the WRDSB for $1.75 million. The matter has now been settled out of court, and while the details of that settlement are confidential, Burjoski said “I’m genuinely pleased with how this case has concluded”.

Over to the Peel District School Board, which has been taken over (again) by the Ministry of Education. As you may recall, the last time Doug Ford took over the PDSB, appointing a supervisor, it was due to incessant disruptions of Board operations by woke activists who had aligned themselves with part of the fractured senior administration. In the wake of the death in police custody of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the ensuing moral panic, the opportunistic activists and their allies were able to put serious pressure on Ford. Sadly for the teachers and students of the PDSB, Ford, ever the astute politician, capitulated, and the PDSB has been advancing “anti-racism” (racism against Whites, Asians, Jews, and others), gender ideology (you can be born in the wrong body), and Indigenous exceptionalism (If you’ve got one drop of indigenous blood in you, you’re entitled to a range of inherent rights denied to the rest of us mere “settlers”). I have written many times about the disastrous real-word results of these viewpoints being implemented as policy.

Well, this time, Ford is taking over due to mismanagement. The Board evidently botched its enrollment projections so badly that they were poised to lay off a bunch of teachers and other education workers, resulting in a major reorganization at the school level which would have jumbled classes and teaching assignments. Parents were outraged, so Ford stepped in. Inexplicably, the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation has been all over social media castigating Ford for taking this action, even though by doing so, he is actually saving teaching jobs. I guess from a union perspective, Ford is just the devil and can never do anything right. The OSSTF argues that Ford is undermining local democracy. But as I have written before, School Board Trustees don’t have much power. It is the senior administration that is calling the shots, based on the whims of their activist puppet masters. Those administrators then “educate” the elected trustees, who face dire personal and professional consequences if they run afoul of the ideological orthodoxy.

The unions’ solution to everything is always to throw money at the system. They’ve got a point that funding has been declining under Ford, but taxpayers know that without a coherent strategy in place to improve academic achievement and bring back effective progressive discipline, more money, in and of itself, won’t fix the problems.

The possible good news of the PDSB takeover is that Ford may, just may, take advantage of the opportunity to reverse some of the disastrous woke-inspired policies there, as he did when he took over the Toronto District School Board. There, he restored meritocratic admissions to specialty schools and took steps to prevent the Board from erasing Canadian History, which school boards have been doing in order to promote their imbecilic and infantilizing “Europeans were evil, Indians were victims” narrative. These are baby steps, to be sure, but steps in the right direction.

Over to Bowmore Public School in the TDSB, where a vice principal and two teachers have been fired and 8 others have been suspended without pay as the school descended into chaos following the botched implementation of a new teaching model in mid-September, two weeks after the school year had started and students had just settled into their day-to-day routines.

This proved extremely disruptive for teachers and students alike, and, most frustratingly, was done for no apparent educational reason. In fact, every indication was, and still is, that the new model will be detrimental to learning. The previous model, in use for years, had been judged as largely successful (no system is perfect) by teachers, parents, and students alike. In it, teachers were teaching specific subjects in which they had high pedagogical expertise. Under the new model, they would teach the same kids a list of subjects.

So, the school administration, at the insistence of the superintendent of education, decided to make this move for purely ideological reasons after the school year had started, with no evidence that it would improve learning or student wellbeing. What could go wrong?

The sad truth is that Doug Ford can take over a School Board here or there or change a few policies in one Board or another, but the underlying problems in the Public School system in Ontario won’t be addressed by this kind of willy-nilly, whack-a-mole approach. The system as it stands is not based on creating an environment where all students are expected to strive for excellence in academics and every other facet of school life. It is based on engineering equal (mediocre at best) academic outcomes for identity groups. Discipline is seen as oppression, so perpetrators of unruly or violent behaviour are treated as victims and never face consequences proportional for their actions.

Ontario taxpayers are paying billions of dollars and deserve a fair and effective public school system. We need to put as much pressure as possible on Ford to stop tweaking and make the big systemic changes needed.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read Standardized Testing Needed to Combat Marks Inflation/Attenuation.

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