The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

Allow me to open the door so that the elephant may walk into the room. The swedish try something new to get kids educated, but problems quickly develop :

1) People don't like shareholders taking money from the public sector. 2) People don't like teachers being underpaid.

So, let's level up this argument. What if teachers were making the profits ? Would that still be repugnant to you ?

How about a system where anyone (and literally I mean anyone, not just someone with a Master's in education) can start a school out of their living room. Let's say a retired entrepreneur that used to run a factory in your town.

6 families agree to pay with a school voucher so this retiree will teach the kids full time, at her house.

Public schools will lose the students, as will the certified teachers. The profit will instead flow to the retiree. She's making ~72K /yr and is happy because that is substantially more than the median teacher salary.

Is this scenario still "Shameful" ? What if more teachers did it, they banded together and formed a collective ? Once the profit gets larger.. does it then become repugnant ?

Lets take another step further. Lets say the collective teachers choose to retire. They worked hard, they taught many students, but now they are now done. They get to keep the stock in the collective they founded. We now have stockholders.

What is then, the effective difference between the stockholders in sweden and the stockholders of my example ?

You are drawing conclusions about Swedish education based on a biased sample (people admitted to KTH).

It's true that looking at people admitted to elite medical schools would introduce even bigger bias, but it does not mean that the sample you chose is representative.

The cards are locked to a few restaurants.

What I am saying is that free schools end up with the easy students. It is not as easy as "anyone can go there" since we have the principle of proximity (närhetsprincipen). People living close to the school will have a higher probability of getting a place. In which areas are the schools of Engelska Skolan? Academedia? Kunskapsskolan? Look in areas above the 80th socioeconomic percentile.

In a system where each school gets a fixed amount of money per student, this puts public schools at a disadvantage, yet the results do not reflect this. We have a school system that leads to more segregation, more costs (like the recent debacle about cities having to compensate free schools for rather inane things) - but we get very little for it.

The equivalence ("likvärdigheten") of the Swedish school system is at an all time low, and it has been getting constantly worse since the early 80s. The free school reform has done nothing but accelerate the problem.

I don't mind free schools at all. I don't even mind that they are making money from it. What I do mind is that none of the promises of the free school reform has been delivered on. I am old enough to remember the promises of less segregation. Better schools driven by passionate teachers (these do exist). Schools where gifted students flourish.

This seems to never have been evaluated. None of these things have happened.

> What I am saying is that free schools end up with the easy students.

Of course they do, but isn't that sort of the point with competition? The good schools get the good students, that would happed regardless of who owned them.

> In which areas are the schools of Engelska Skolan? Academedia? Kunskapsskolan? Look in areas above the 80th socioeconomic percentile

You keep repeating this, I'm not sure why. Do you think I have disputed it? I certainly wouldn't want to start a free school in a ghetto, I'd definitely choose a nice area.

Or are you repeating it because you think it's especially problematic?

> In a system where each school gets a fixed amount of money per student, this puts public schools at a disadvantage, yet the results do not reflect this.

Don't free schools have better results?

> Schools where gifted students flourish

Was this ever promised? Gifted students have never been a priority in Swedish schools.

My problem with the free schools is not that it's unfair, because I don't think it is. You need to look at it from the students' point of view. If we had had ghettos in the 70s and you grew up there, you'd be forced to go to a school with mostly unmotivated children. Nowadays motivated children from problem areas have the option to go to schools in nice areas, together with other motivated students.

No the problem for me is that they are publicly funded but run for profit, that's a crazy system that is very easy to abuse.

The fact that parents don't have to pay just makes it worse, then schools can get away with marketing to students, they don't actually have to provide better education.