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The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

dianeravitch.net

51–60 of 215 posts

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#51

I've always been suspicious of for-profit schools. I put my own kids in "traditional" independent schools that you have to pay for, but they're run like charities where there's basically no money for someone to pull out. With for-profit, you have the problems alluded to in the article. If something is up with your kid, eg they need more attention, it's in the school's interest to puff you out so they don't have to ar…

> they're run like charities where there's basically no money for someone to pull out

In the United States, charities (501c3 non-profits) can indeed be run like businesses and there is "money to pull out". The non-profit status requires the organization to use all the money that it brings in, but it is free to use that money on paying high salaries to its management. Consequently, many non-profits become sinecures for their staff, a guaranteed source of a higher and more stable salary than they might find in some other job, and relatively little money is directed towards the charitable endeavours for which the money was ostensibly raised.

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#52

> The business model is simple: you buy smaller independent schools and incorporate them into the growing groups and then make a profit by targeting marketing to easy-to-teach, independent students [...] With a sold-out, simpler student base, the corporation schools can reduce salaries, teacher density, resource staff > When the profitable students have been absorbed by the independent school, the municipal school is…

Uh, are you suggesting the municipalities should just deny education to the unprofitable students?

Not sure how concentrating easy students would help if you still have to teach the complex ones too, and since the municipalities must provide education to eveyone they can't avoid them like the profit schools do.

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#54
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you call "most and least gifted" is in my opinion better described as "most and least privileged". And coeducation of students of different levels of privilege just seems like a good thing, nothing that needs to be dealt with.

No, you can also be underprivileged and gifted/talented (assuming you mean economic or racial privilege).

If you're underprivileged no test is going to detect your gifts. You're going to be hungry, have poor sleep, possibly abused, all sorts of things that will make you look like you're less capable than you are.

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#55
I'm a student in one of the AcadeMedia for-profit schools. They have around 30 schools with the same brand name as mine and they keep on buying others. There's over 600 of them. There are of course other brands that they own but this one is focused on technology.

Now let me tell you about my experience. First, this school is very focused on marketing. They keep on doing things that are only for seemingly attracting students. For example, they made a "maker space" with more 3d printers than anyone could ever need. I'm not against 3d printers but who needs 10 when only one is being used at a time. They also failed to mention their shitty secondary basement location on a showing of the school for upcoming students. They literally bought a second location to double the amount of students, and it had air quality issues for two years. No windows except a few ones in the roof. This location still isn't mentioned to students looking at the school. Wonder why.

All of these marketing-focused efforts have real impacts for the students. For example, there isn't any room for a kitchen, so they give us lunch cards. These get loaded with 55kr each day (about $6.5). Then they have agreements with some local restaurants at which we eat. Problem is that normally those restaurants would change maybe $12. As a result very few of them allow us in and we get tiny portions. This is served to growing teens.

Now I have asd and bipolar-2. Don't even get me started on how badly they're able to handle that. Nothing really ever improves. It's all talk. As a result, I'm about to drop out.

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#57
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you call "most and least gifted" is in my opinion better described as "most and least privileged". And coeducation of students of different levels of privilege just seems like a good thing, nothing that needs to be dealt with.

Of course higher intelligence is a privilege, as is higher sportive ability and other attributes given to you from birth. This includes your own personal attributes as well as the privilege that comes from your family's wealth and status. But actually, the word "privilege" muddles the waters, because those are two very different things. I agree that schools should not differentiate based on families' status and wealt…

  Schools do not treat stupid and intelligent children the same, teachers - with few exceptions - do. Not because they are evil, but because to be able to cater to the different levels of intelligence and the variation in interests that you will naturally find in a random sample of children they require the time and opportunities to do so.

  As long as we treat teachers as the least important workers, without acknowledging the critical work they do [0], have classes that have more pupils than a teacher can follow individually in a meaningful way and consider education "an expense" that needs reduction, rather than "an investment" we will not have a proper education system.

  On the flip side: an uneducated population is easier to sway, so there is not a lot of pressure on the political establishment to change things.
[0] Lack of self awareness - https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Er2_n9pXUAMZnyq.jpg:large

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#58
Incredibly melodramatic. Comparing yourself to someone denouncing an anti-semitic persecution (and by implication your opponents to anti-semetic persecutors) is not really a good basis for discussion. I cannot find anything resembling an argument in this entire article. If the swedish education system is so uniquely, shamefully terrible, wouldn't we expect it to actually lead to worse results then that of other countries? Is there any evidence for that?

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#59
post #34
post #32

Sweden has started to view pupils like a product of a private corporation. We should copy our nordic neighbor Finland which has very high Pisa results. For now a 1:1 copy of Finland would do fine for Sweden.

In Finland, Local ”moderats” and liberals managed to cut over 1.5 billion euros from education in the past 10 years. Pretty sure they have private venture backed school system in mind.

> Pretty sure they have private venture backed school system in mind.

Would you have something to back this assumption up?

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#60

> The business model is simple: you buy smaller independent schools and incorporate them into the growing groups and then make a profit by targeting marketing to easy-to-teach, independent students [...] With a sold-out, simpler student base, the corporation schools can reduce salaries, teacher density, resource staff > When the profitable students have been absorbed by the independent school, the municipal school is…

Uh, are you suggesting the municipalities should just deny education to the unprofitable students? Not sure how concentrating easy students would help if you still have to teach the complex ones too, and since the municipalities must provide education to eveyone they can't avoid them like the profit schools do.

I think the parent is proposing different municipal schools for easy-to-teach and hard-to-teach pupils.

I don't see any way to achieve this politically, ever.

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