Live data from Hacker News

The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

dianeravitch.net

141–150 of 215 posts

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#141

Running for profit infrastructure is so stupid I honestly cannot describe it in words. You want to minimize your costs, not maximize them.

No, you want to maximise the quality for the given cost.

Profit driven schools in Sweden probably do minimize their costs, but that of course only benefits the private equity firms that own them, not the state or the students.

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We used to have the option of regular supermarkets, but they later banned it because they didn't want students eating inside the school at winter.

Do they have food trucks in Sweden? Maybe students can pool in money and hire a cook or contract with a food truck to provide meals on time. When I was in school back in India..and this was many decades ago...me and my cousins would get hot lunch delivered by my grandparents. But there was this group of kids who had working parents and from nuclear families...and a bunch of them hired a lady to cook meals for 10-12 o…

The lunch cards are limited to companies that the school allows.

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is amazing. You recommend eating burgers from McD for lunch every day? Not fruits, not home cooked food, not simple sandwiches, not street food --- but MacDonalds burgers in Sweden Holy shit.

No, I reccomend changing schools as their lunch allowance isn't enough to cover even a full meal at McDonalds. If they just got cash the recommendation would be to get something from a supermarket, but it's locked to restasurants so single burgers is likely an upper limit outside of the cointracted restaurants that, as stated, sometimes denies service. I wonder what gives you the idea that hot dogs is much better tha…

> No, I reccomend changing schools as their lunch allowance isn't enough to cover even a full meal at McDonalds

You suggest - please correct me if Im wrong - that a person should change schools because of lunch allowance?

Jesus' feces.Holy shit!

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#144
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profit-driven schools don't cater to gifted kids. They cater to kids with rich and highly educated parents. The goal is to do less, to extract more profit.

Neither. Parents don't pay for schools in Sweden, so profit driven schools are just as free as other schools. Also, they are not elite schools in any sense, they are just slightly better organised and attract students that care enough about their education to select a different school than the default. Sweden is not the US, it's quite different.

What you're saying, especially the part about "slightly better organised and attract students that care enough about their education" is talking point rhethoric and not anything substantiated in fact. The schools get a fixed amount of money per student from the state. If you have students with high socio-economic status, you can get away with having fewer teachers per student, as well has having teachers that aren't properly educated. One of the more prominent for-profit charter schools is the "International English School" (IES). They aren't only "English" for marketing purposes (because being an "English" school means you can do more marketing about teaching with "higher discipline"), they are also "English" because that allows them to get away with recruiting more teachers from abroad. This is what for-profit charter schools are about. You can't "optimize" what's essentially a service institution. You can only cut to better your margins. Or cheat, which they do. Not only by having fewer authorized teachers, but also by straight up inveting better grades for students, which is something that helps with marketing (see a pattern here?).

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#145

> With the deregulation of the 1990s, the ambition was to create thriving, independent schools, foundations, parent cooperatives and small limited company schools with educational alternatives. Sure, and the purpose of privatising welfare institutions, railroads and electric grids is to benefit the citizens, not the cronies of politicians...

That's not the problem. The problem is having government partially funding private companies.

Let the parents pay for private schools and the market will select schools that do the best compromise for their need. I've found some unverified results claiming that parents are more satisfied with Swedish independent school than public schools. If that's true, parents are still getting a better service than with the public offering.

I'm pro privatisation in general because, in my experience, government-run institutions waste more money and provide a worse service.

Of course if you get politicians underselling public assets to their friends, the loss on the assets is just going to be pocketed by politicians and you'll get a worse service.

I don't blame privatisation though, I blame the politicians.

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#146
Similar things are happening in the USA. Charter schools get to cherry pick docile students who would probably do well no matter what school they went to.

Rich people of course send their kids to high end private schools, residential or day schools, and that's in an entirely different world.

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#147

What's confusing to me is it says the private schools are attracting more driven, independent and smarter students while increasing class sizes, reducing teacher salaries and reducing resource staff. So how are they attracting these students and why can't the public schools attract these students? Where I'm from, small class sizes is one of the first things parents want.

Public schools have to take in everyone. And this means the kid sitting next to your child could be a druggie or have a vile temper or tempt your child to ‘go down the wrong path’

Schooling is more than grades. It’s a place ones children disappear for about 8 hours and you can’t have access to them or what influences them. Private schools = a little bit of control you can exert on how one would want their children to be educated. This is especially true for religious parents.

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#148

Something's lost in translation here: what do they mean by "joy grades"?

Grade inflation: the same test outcome is rewarded with progressively higher grades as time goes on and pressure increases to improve grades.

Colleges too, in the USA.

Parents don't pay $60K/year for their kids to get Cs.

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#149
post #7

While I agree with the article about the problems of profit-driven schools, the whole situation (and the article in parts) points to a imho bigger problem in most education systems: Profit-driven schools cater to the more able, easier to educate and more intelligent pupils. Why can they do that? Because public schools almost everywhere insist on coeducation of the most and least gifted. This is severely holding back…

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.

How is this a good thing? No parent would want their gifted child to be held back because there are other less gifted children in the class who will hold their child back. It is easy to understand their point of view. When you say ‘just seems like a good thing’...it begs the question.. ‘for whom’

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#150

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 s…

Is bringing a lunch you make at home an option? You might even be able to save up some money that way.
Post reply on HN