In recent years, the muscle of the elected school board trustee has atrophied across Canada.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press

Ontario’s Ministry of Education has told elected trustees at five school boards to step aside in recent months, citing financial mismanagement significant enough to warrant a supervisor stepping in to oversee day-to-day operations.

In media sound bites, Ontario Education Minister Paul Calandra has zeroed in on the expenses of certain school board trustees – ranging from the mundane (a $15 milkshake and a $145 Apple Watch band were expensed by a trustee in Toronto) to the more egregious (four members of a Brantford, Ont., school board spent $190,000 on a trip to Italy last year) – all to make a greater point that the province’s education system needs a major overhaul.

He’s right, but for a far more important reason than what a trustee might be ordering late at night from McDonald’s. Abolishing elected school boards would be less a move against democratic oversight than an acknowledgment of reality: the school board model is outdated, and represents faux accountability.

Beginning in the early 19th century, the small, mostly rural settler communities of pre-Confederation Canada were locally represented in the education........

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