Hadn't he just dropped a bundle of new money on them? Hadn't he all but promised oodles more by launching a review of the government's school funding formula? And what was the thanks he got? School trustees in Toronto, Ottawa and Hamilton have either passed deficit budgets, or refused to present a budget at all, in defiance of provincial law.

"It's passing strange to me," the Premier complained, "that in the year that the province gives $565-million additional [funding] ... to improve the public education system ... that that's the year they would choose to decide ... not to balance their books." But of course it's not strange at all. The Harris Tories were never the skinflints they were made out to be, having overrun their original spending targets by some 25%. But Mr.

Eves' well-advertised flexibility does not signal, to the hardened ideologues and professional negotiators who make their living off the state, that they should curb their appetites. Rather, the message it sends is: The buffet is now open. If the air over Ontario's schools is thick with confrontation, again, it is the unwitting work of Nicely-Nicely Eves -- and his soulmate, Elizabeth Witmer, the Education Minister.

Indeed, had either of them read the report of Al Rosen, the forensic accountant the province appointed to inspect the books at the Ottawa board, they would have found the same advice: More money only encourages them. Mr. Rosen's report not only criticizes the board's refusal to make the reasonable cuts in spending that would enable it to live within its means. It specifically recommends against making any more money available, on the grounds that "trustees would not be motivated to effect obvious cost efficiencies if additional funding were provided." But Ottawa's board is hardly unique in this regard.

Similar analysis is found in the report of Charles Smedmor, the special auditor investigating the Hamilton school board's finances, and in Mr. Rosen's latest effort, released yesterday, this time on the Toronto District School Board.

All three reports are scathing in their depiction of the financial and political irresponsibility that is endemic among trustees. Mr. Rosen, for example, finds that of $912-million in transitional funding provided to the newly amalgamated Toronto board since 1998, fully three-quarters never made it to the classroom, but rather was eaten up by administrative costs. That would be the same board that is this year headed, according to Mr. Rosen's calculations, for a $140-million deficit, unless the province accepts his recommendation and takes over the board, as it has been urged to do in Hamilton and as it has already done in Ottawa.

Further examples are legion. The Hamilton board, according to Mr. Smedmor, has no means of tracking how many days its full-time teachers are absent -- one reason the cost of supply teachers is running out of control. Conversely, he notes, cutting the supply- teacher budget "may give teachers an incentive to avoid absenteeism where possible," since they would then be forcing their colleagues to cover for them.

It is that culture of fecklessness that is the consistent feature in all three reports. The Hamilton board's deficit was "a direct result of the trustees' unwillingness to close and consolidate schools." Toronto trustees "do not agree that they have broad responsibilities to Ontario's taxpayers." The Ottawa board's financial crisis was "literally self-inflicted," again owing to its refusal to close underused schools.

In which case, the Tories should be asking themselves much more searching questions than whether to take over this or that board. After all, if the boards can be so easily replaced, it suggests that they are less than essential to begin with. Most serious studies of schools that work emphasize the importance of highly motivated and independent principals, with real managerial power over budgets and staff.

How to give Ontario's principals the independence and the motivation they need? Simple.

Blow up the school boards. Make each public school a self-managed institution, with its own budget, free to compete for students, within certain broad guidelines as to curriculum and the like. Yet the Tories' earlier "reforms," far from abolishing school boards, merely cut their number. That is, they made them bigger -- fortresses for every blinkered educrat and partisan activist to wage war on the government.

But maybe Mr. Eves is cannier than I thought. Maybe his weakness is only a feint, designed to lure the boards into overreaching themselves. Maybe the takeover of the Ottawa board is merely the prelude to abolition. Maybe I'll flap my wings and fly to the moon.