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The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

140 points by cloudfifty 6y ago

techpression 6y ago
Most people with a non-political agenda would agree that the problems with the Swedish school system began when it was handed over to the municipalities from the state, I don’t think there has been a successful migration of responsibilities like this ever in the history of the country. We then had to suffer years of anti-scientific school regulations where student feelings and choice superseded traditional curriculum. Invalid causality between free markets and segregation, it’s dishonest at its best given all the other variables in society happening at the same time. Not that privatization was successful, with a lax hands off approach, but the agenda of the author is clearly shining through here.
- bov 6y ago
  As is yours here.
  - illuminati1911 6y ago
    Proving logical fallacy in the article?
  - techpression 6y ago
    Please do enlighten me about my agenda, this will be very interesting to say the least.
- brtkdotse 6y ago
  I have a mathematical agenda, I can’t get the following to balance: Municipal: Money_for_education - cost_of_teachers - cost_of_buiding - misc_costs = 0 Private: Money_for_education - cost_of_teachers - cost_of_buiding - misc_costs - cost_of_marketing = profit
  - leereeves 6y ago
    The author claims that "the corporation schools can reduce salaries, teacher density, resource staff." Though that claim makes me wonder how these schools attract students. The "independent students" and their parents must not be too happy with the municipal schools if understaffed private schools are an appealing alternative.
    - brtkdotse 6y ago
      See ‘cost_of_marketing’.
      - leereeves 6y ago
        If the marketing is misleading, couldn't students just go back to their old schools?
        brtkdotse 6y ago
        In theory, yes, but it’s not like changing internet providers - kids have friends, commuting might be harder. Not something you do on a whim.
    - cloudfifty 6y ago
      They appeal to privileged students with well-educated parents. There's also a queue system in place to these schools which have many years waiting time, further segregating "active" parents from "inactive" parents. These students require less resources to educate and thus generate more profit. Also the students are now customers, and should ofc be made happy to give good ratings, which has caused grades to be inflated beyond the students actual results on standardized tests. Furthermore these schools generally market themselves as "international schools" with English as the primary language, making them able to use a loop hole in the law to employ cheaper non-licensed teachers from abroad.
    - rndgermandude 6y ago
      They weed out hard-to-teach students, the author says, which means it will drive down the cost of teaching in private schools (less "hand holding" of bad students means fewer teachers required) while raising the cost in municipal schools at the same time, because the municipal schools basically get all the "bad students" which require additional hand holding. Furthermore, if you outright reject "bad students" - where "bad" may mean intellectually bad, socially bad, bad economic background, disabled ("with diagnosis"), etc - then you can later claim in your marketing materials that students in your private school are performing above average. It probably will also lower administrative burden, as the "easy" students are less likely to get in major trouble, are less likely to need involvement of the school and child protected services in their lives, the teachers go to court as a witness in child abuse cases less, etc. And of course, you can always simply pay teachers less than in municipal schools - which is one of the claims of the author as well. And the last claim the author made is that a lot of these companies just hire some under-qualifiied teachers whenever they can get away with it. I have to admit, the author makes a lot of sense to me.
- boxed 6y ago
  This is the common wisdom in Sweden. It's also trivially false. Sweden made a bunch of changes at the same time. Why would this one thing be the only thing? And why is our neighbor Finland able to have the best school in Europe and they did the exact same thing? Logic seems to have little place in this discussion. The problem with the Swedish privatization in my opinion is that it managed to enable scientologists and real actual islamists (vetenskapsskolan) to open schools.
  - techpression 6y ago
    Finland didn’t do the same thing at all, they modeled their system based of the Swedish one back when it was state driven and science based.
  - mongol 6y ago
    It wasn't at the same time. It was approximately at the same time, but parent is right: it _started_ with the handover to municipalities, the privatisation was a few years later
leecarraher 6y ago
The us has a similar profit driven model parallel to state funded schools. While private schools have always been available, only in the last few decades did they move from large monolithic institutions to national corporations. What we tend to call charter schools, profit off of government funding while sometimes putting corporate incentives over student well being. As with public schools, there is a spectrum of excellent to failing schools. But instead of the students success determining profit, the school is often faced with the decision: chase test scores to get more government funding, or file countless, often borderline false IEPs for difficult students and profit off the extra "need based" government funding. This had the effect of replacing the natural spectrum of education with a pigeon hole, excellent high stress test driven school. Or failing, school whose goal is more that of a prison than educational institution.
- jschveibinz 6y ago
  I would like to address some of the hyperbole in this comment. The US has a majority of publicly-funded primary schools (K-12)—- 16,800 districts by a recent count —- that are primarily funded by local property taxes and run by local school boards. Only 9% of schools are private, and only 7% of public schools are charter schools (semi-private). National funding for primary education in the US is relatively small (roughly 8%) and is mostly tied to special services. The US Dept. of Education is toothless: it is primarily focused on setting policies and administering Title 9. If Sweden has a problem with profiteering in national primary education funding, it is difficult to draw an analogy to US schools just based on the facts stated above. It is true that some US school districts suffer from funding shortfalls due to low local tax base, and the need to show passing grades does drive some schools to “cheat” in order to receive state and federal subsidies, but this is not a universal country-wide problem. The magic solution to educating low-income, socially disadvantaged children who live in very difficult living situations with no assistance from parents has yet to be devised. Or has it? Check out what these folks are doing in Baltimore: https://www.thread.org/ https://www.thread.org/
corty 6y ago
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 and limiting the development of gifted children and imho needs to be dealt with.
- UrsaMedius 6y ago
  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.
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - viceroyalbean 6y ago
    The issue, in my experience, is that you have to compromise somewhere. That means either leaving the higher performers to be bored, or leaving the lower performers not achieving the minimum. Neither seems like a desirable outcome.
    - rusabd 6y ago
      Well, we can always f*ck up both groups. It seems this is the current approach.
    - AdrianB1 6y ago
      No, you don't have to compromise at all. Personal experience: I had a great math teacher in mid school; he gathered the best students from the 5 classes in that year in one class and he set the baseline quite high. For the last 2 years half of our class was taking the prizes at all the inter-school competitions in the city and a few of us from the nationals. Most of that class went to the best high schools in the city and most are today great doctors (medical) or scientists. Imagine that did not happen in mid-school and everybody would be an average Joe - that is a loss for humanity, not just for us. Try to read Ender's Game (the book, the movie is terrible). This is very tough, but if you need great people you can help by creating the conditions to grow them. How many Einsteins wasted their lives achieving nothing and how earlier curing diseases and improving technologies was possible if that waste did not happen? The compromise is to waste the resources that we have in the name of equality; we cannot make everyone smart, we only can make them all stupid, so let's do equality.
joshuaissac 6y ago
> 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 left with a more difficult student base This is the gist of the article, that private entities are driving up the government's cost of education by attracting cheaper-to-teach students and then claiming the government funding allocated to those students. The municipality is then left to teach the harder-to-teach students. The funding per student is presumably averaged, so this is similar to the concept of privatising the profits and socialising the losses. But is there anything stopping the municipalities themselves from competing in the same way? A group of municipalities could also pool resources to reduce costs and attract cheaper-to-teach students. I think the article focuses too much on private profit, with only a small paragraph each about how the independent schools are given an unfair information advantage, and how some of them are controlled by religious extremists: > National Agency for Education made all statistics about individual schools secret > a school system that increases segregation and allows jihadist schools run by people with links to Islamism and violent extremism
- SiempreViernes 6y ago
  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.
  - distances 6y ago
    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.
    - SiempreViernes 6y ago
kryogen1c 6y ago
i dont know about the social political education politics of sweden, but the generalized issue is the unanswered question: what is education for? the problem with involving a free market (issues like regulatory capture and misregulation notwithstanding) is that if the product isnt clear, the market output may not be desirable and could be quite malformed. as yogi berra said, if you dont know where youre going, you might not get there. education serves at least 4 purposes: -socialized child care -socialized child feeding -vocational training -general education point four is not well defined and point three is often never defined (who's whole education track is special built for a job they are guaranteed?) given these parameters, what is the expected output of a free market optimization? as we'd say about bad calculations in the navy: garbage in, garbage out.
bjornsing 6y ago
> While schools and colleges are sounding the alarm about declining knowledge results, joy grades are rising, as grades have become a competitive tool on the market. This in my opinion is the main problem. Take this "marketing tool" away from the private schools, and the rest of the problems are fixable (e.g. with diversified pupil compensation). But when you let a private business both grade themselves and sell entry to (free!) university, you will quickly have massive problems... Up until the 70-ties or so there was a separate government agency responsible for final exams and grades. If we want to keep private schools (and I think we should at least try), then we need to reinstate that separation of education and evaluation, urgently. Problem is we now have a large swath of middle class parents who feel that they've been very smart and ensured a great future for their children by choosing the right school for them (and at least subconsciously they understand that the main reason is the inflated grades). They don't want that privilege taken away. There is no limit to the hypocrisy many people can accept if they feel it benefits their kids. Source: I'm Swedish, but I don't have kids so not super knowledgeable. Just my impression after following the debate and talking to friends with kids.
- bjeds 6y ago
  I sort of agree with what you are saying (I'm also Swedish) but I think the incentives are different, and due to the American dominance of Hacker News readers it's worth to clear up: Swedish middle class parents do not choose "good schools" because they want a "great education" for their kids as a competitive advantage... in the sense of a well-off American parent want their kids to go to Harvard or MIT or similar. Swedish middle class parents choose "not-bad schools" (not the same as "good schools") because they want to shelter their kids from trouble and from problems, for example from the social issues from failed integration of immigrants. So it's more about avoiding trouble and "white flight", than the education itself.
  - logicchains 6y ago
    The same is true in Australia: parents choose "not-bad" schools to minimize the chance of their kids being knifed or beaten up by other kids. But it's not due to immigration, instead just to "white trash" for lack of a better word raising violent, substance-abusing children.
acd 6y ago
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.
- kakoni 6y ago
  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.
  - distances 6y ago
    > Pretty sure they have private venture backed school system in mind. Would you have something to back this assumption up?
    - SiempreViernes 6y ago
      There is their general intention to privatize everything possible because they oppose "big state"?
      - distances 6y ago
        Who is against "big state" in Finland, are you referring to the National Coalition Party? Specifically, I've never heard of anyone wanting to privatise the school system so I'd like to get something that substantiates these claims. Otherwise it's just a textbook example of FUD.
    - kakoni 6y ago
      Sure. These links are in Finnish [1] https://www.kokoomusnuoret.fi/kannanotot/2015/05/suomi-tarvitsee-maksullisia-kouluja/ https://www.kokoomusnuoret.fi/kannanotot/2015/05/suomi-tarvi... [2] https://www.verkkouutiset.fi/pitaako-vanhempien-saada-valita-lastensa-koulu-paattajilta-yllattavia-kannanottoja-41030/#39059280 https://www.verkkouutiset.fi/pitaako-vanhempien-saada-valita...
lordnacho 6y ago
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 arrange that. If your kid is doing well, they could do less well than their potential, which might again require more attention. Ordinary independent schools still have some of these pressures, esp wrt to booting out failing kids, but they don't have an expectation of leaving resources for profits. What you're really buying with tuition fees is other parents. Other people who are also signalling, by burning a year's rent, that they value education and will make sure their kids are focused on doing things like reading and numbers.
- lr4444lr 6y ago
  Your supposition is logical, but the reality is, budget directors, chancellors, and politicians are all under tremendous pressure to stem education costs in the public sector, and it has a lot of impact in what's done or not done. That's why laws guaranteeing the right to education, particularly special education, are important.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  > 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.
- Grustaf 6y ago
  The best thing about the Swedish system is that it also ruins the public schools. All schools get paid per student, so public schools have also taken to using marketing and non-education related ways to attract students, such as "cool" designs, free ipads etc.
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imtringued 6y ago
Running for profit infrastructure is so stupid I honestly cannot describe it in words. You want to minimize your costs, not maximize them.
- Grustaf 6y ago
  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.
Clewza313 6y ago
Something's lost in translation here: what do they mean by "joy grades"?
- ahendriksen 6y ago
  Grade inflation: the same test outcome is rewarded with progressively higher grades as time goes on and pressure increases to improve grades.
  - JJMcJ 6y ago
    Colleges too, in the USA. Parents don't pay $60K/year for their kids to get Cs.
alvarlagerlof 6y ago
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.
- SiempreViernes 6y ago
  Wow, do you at least have as mc donalds nearby so you can get a few of their cheap "child sized" burgers? Hope you can find a better school!
  - vagrantJin 6y ago
    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.
    - alvarlagerlof 6y ago
      We actually have McDonald's and Max on the list and there's a whole bunch of people who eat there very often.
amadeuspagel 6y ago
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?
- FabHK 6y ago
  Agreed, arrogating Émile Zola's battle cry for yourself is in my view overreaching. On the other hand, as Wikipedia notes, "J'accuse! has become a common expression of outrage and accusation against someone powerful", so I think it has become more generic, and doesn't contain the implicit accusation of anti-semitism anymore. > wouldn't we expect it to actually lead to worse results then that of other countries? It might take many years to manifest itself (at university, PISA study, etc.), though. As such, an early warning by a practitioner that has first hand experience with what's happening in schools right now strikes me as valuable.
  - username90 6y ago
    Sweden has had private schools for decades now though, and results are improving since the last reform. Also I don't think private schools is a big deal, good students avoid them since they all have really bad reputation. Nobody will think "Wow, you went to $private_school?" instead it is more like "You went to that school huh, are you an idiot?". There are a few exceptions, but only for the few schools that were private before the reforms this article talks about and they take in so few students that it wouldn't show up in statistics.
    - Grustaf 6y ago
      > "You went to that school huh, are you an idiot?" Which schools have this reputation?
- mongol 6y ago
Ottolay 6y ago
As someone who is not all that familiar with education policy, is this basically analogous to for profit charter schools in the US?
- bjeds 6y ago
  Roughly: Education is tax funded so each kid has a pile of money in the local government budget. The school where the kid ends up, gets this pile of money. The kids (or rather the parents) can pick and choose between schools. This naturally leads to a bunch of complexities, for example marketing catering to what the kids think they want (iPads, 3d printers, whatever) instead of what they need. Also, there's an incentive from privately owned schools to use this money as efficiently as possible. (Note: when I say "as efficiently as possible" I try to mean that in a neutral way: if you are reading this and are left-leaning, feel free to interpret that as "the school will cut costs to make a profit" whereas if you are reading this and right-leaning feel free to interpret that as using the budget more efficiently than the government could).
yawaworht1978 6y ago
Holy crap, the homophobic comments about shielding their children from immigrants children/issues. How dare you speak in the name of other people and get a grip and grow a pair. Jesus this is Sweden and Australia we are talking about, not a war zone. You do not know the really bad places on this planet. Let your children learn conflict resolution, they are not gonna be assassinated in school. Or well, pay for these useless schools ripping you off if you think the kids there are all saints and angels.
username90 6y ago
KTH tests engineering students math abilities by giving new students the same test every year. There is nothing gained or lost from this test so nobody studied for it. Anyway, this gives us a reasonable trend in how well students know the basics, and it shows that students are getting better and not worse right now. The worst class was the one starting 2007. https://www.kth.se/aktuellt/nyheter/trenden-har-vant-mattekunskaper-okar-1.692717 https://www.kth.se/aktuellt/nyheter/trenden-har-vant-matteku...
- JorgeGT 6y ago
  Note that KTH is an elite institution so there is a selection bias. It's like saying education in America must be going well because new MIT students are getting better.
  - bjeds 6y ago
    Now you are exaggerating. KTH is of course a good school for Swedish standards but calling it elite is weird. In what way would you say that KTH is elite, because I genuinely do not understand how the word "elite" applies to this school? I'm a bit out of touch, but of all schools in Sweden, the only I'd call elite - by the common meaning of the word - is Operahögskolan (I think it's called, the Opera school) and possibly Stockholm School of Economics and the medical schools of the larger older universities + Karolinska. Those places are highly competitive. Everyone I know, from the little village I grew up in Sweden, who wanted to go to KTH, did so.
    - JorgeGT 6y ago
      Maybe elite is the wrong term, I'm not a native speaker... what I meant is that KTH is probably the best technological university in Sweden and one of the best tech unis in Europe overall, so the math level of its admitted students is not necessarily representative of the general level.
      - Grustaf 6y ago
        It is the best technological university in Sweden, but it's also one of the biggest universities, if not the biggest. It accepts a lot more than the elite, in any sense of that word.
AlgorithmicTime 6y ago
I mean, the obvious solution would be to stop working so hard to educate the ineducatable.
einpoklum 6y ago
> In the rest of the world, it is unreasonable for limited companies to make unregulated profits on tax money I envy the author for living in a country where one can imagine that commercial companies don't make unregulated profits on tax tax money.
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atomicson 6y ago
When we put so much trust to the government, another type of organization of human being. We give them so much power to manage all things and we loose control of them. They hide something from us for their own benefits. Some of them run on their own personal or group interests. Take them down all over the world. These elites are the real parasites of civilization.
japhyr 6y ago
For anyone interested in this issue in the US, there's an excellent new book out called A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, by Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire. It traces the push and pull between the promise of quality education for the masses through public education, and the attempt to extract as much profit as possible from schools that's been going on for a very long time. They dispel many myths that persist about public education, and connect current privatization pushes to decades-long attempts to undermine public education. https://www.amazon.com/Wolf-Schoolhouse-Door-Dismantling-Education/dp/1620974940/ https://www.amazon.com/Wolf-Schoolhouse-Door-Dismantling-Edu...
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Grustaf 6y ago
> 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...
- jokethrowaway 6y ago
  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.
  - Grustaf 6y ago
    > I'm pro privatisation in general because, in my experience, government-run institutions waste more money and provide a worse service. Of course that is generally true, but some things are natural monopolies. For example the railroads. If there is no effective competition, private companies have no real incentive to improve service, but they do have an incentive to lower their costs, often leading to worse service.
nearbuy 6y ago
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.
- jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  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.
  - Grustaf 6y ago
    In Sweden all schools have to accept everyone, you definitely can't discriminate on social or financial grounds or even based on grades.
JJMcJ 6y ago
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.
IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
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 ?
sha1337 6y ago
I would like to give some context to everyone who doesn't come from Sweden. >The following article [...] appeared in the Swedish publication Expressen. Expressen is a known right-leaning news publisher. They are the Fox News of Sweden, you should keep that in mind. Here is an example of the kind of trash you find in Expressen (taken from the article): >I accuse you, the Sweden Democrats [...] you support a school system that increases segregation and allows jihadist schools run by people with links to Islamism and violent extremism They're talking about muslim schools. What is said doesn't accurately represent reality nor is it non-partisan (obviously). Sweden Democrats are the most right-leaning party in the Swedish Parliament, they don't like muslims (to put it mildly). Yet the author is blaming them for not going hard enough on the muslims community in Sweden. It's a bit of a trend now with right-wing extremists in Sweden to focus on attacking muslim schools, as if having Arabic/Quran lessons apart from the regular school curriculum is equivalent to training a militia. This sort of language is not unlike what you would expect a neo-nazi to say about jews, that they are inherently a harm and seek to subvert society, because reasons...
- Grustaf 6y ago
  Expressen might be as trustworthy as Fox News, but it's not right leaning in any meaningful sense of the word. As to islamism, you are aware that they recently closed down Vetenskapsskolan because after a number of islamist scandals. For example, it turned out they had been hiring people returning fighting for ISIS.
  - sha1337 6y ago
    I think truthfulness is a bigger issue than right vs left, if they were truthful I would personally not care about their political leaning. Expressen is right-leaning though, they may not be far-right (like Avpixlat), but they're certainly leaning right. >For example, it turned out they had been hiring people returning fighting for ISIS. They(in plural?) had been hiring people (again in plural?). You have to be accurate here, especially when it comes articles that are demonizing an entire community. Even if it so happened that one employee had links to ISIS, it does not by default make the school administration responsible for what the employee did. For example, if a pedophile teacher gets caught, it's hardly reasonable to blame the school (unless the school administration knew and ignored it).
valuearb 6y ago
Weird that she spends her vitriol on how the teachers are treated, without showing any reduction in school quality.

140 points by cloudfifty 6y ago

Most people with a non-political agenda would agree that the problems with the Swedish school system began when it was handed over to the municipalities from the state, I don’t think there has been a successful migration of responsibilities like this ever in the history of the country. We then had to suffer years of anti-scientific school regulations where student feelings and choice superseded traditional curriculum. Invalid causality between free markets and segregation, it’s dishonest at its best given all the other variables in society happening at the same time. Not that privatization was successful, with a lax hands off approach, but the agenda of the author is clearly shining through here.

bov 6y ago
As is yours here.
- illuminati1911 6y ago
  Proving logical fallacy in the article?
- techpression 6y ago
  Please do enlighten me about my agenda, this will be very interesting to say the least.
brtkdotse 6y ago
I have a mathematical agenda, I can’t get the following to balance: Municipal: Money_for_education - cost_of_teachers - cost_of_buiding - misc_costs = 0 Private: Money_for_education - cost_of_teachers - cost_of_buiding - misc_costs - cost_of_marketing = profit
- leereeves 6y ago
  The author claims that "the corporation schools can reduce salaries, teacher density, resource staff." Though that claim makes me wonder how these schools attract students. The "independent students" and their parents must not be too happy with the municipal schools if understaffed private schools are an appealing alternative.
  - brtkdotse 6y ago
    See ‘cost_of_marketing’.
    - leereeves 6y ago
      If the marketing is misleading, couldn't students just go back to their old schools?
      - brtkdotse 6y ago
        In theory, yes, but it’s not like changing internet providers - kids have friends, commuting might be harder. Not something you do on a whim.
  - cloudfifty 6y ago
    They appeal to privileged students with well-educated parents. There's also a queue system in place to these schools which have many years waiting time, further segregating "active" parents from "inactive" parents. These students require less resources to educate and thus generate more profit. Also the students are now customers, and should ofc be made happy to give good ratings, which has caused grades to be inflated beyond the students actual results on standardized tests. Furthermore these schools generally market themselves as "international schools" with English as the primary language, making them able to use a loop hole in the law to employ cheaper non-licensed teachers from abroad.
  - rndgermandude 6y ago
    They weed out hard-to-teach students, the author says, which means it will drive down the cost of teaching in private schools (less "hand holding" of bad students means fewer teachers required) while raising the cost in municipal schools at the same time, because the municipal schools basically get all the "bad students" which require additional hand holding. Furthermore, if you outright reject "bad students" - where "bad" may mean intellectually bad, socially bad, bad economic background, disabled ("with diagnosis"), etc - then you can later claim in your marketing materials that students in your private school are performing above average. It probably will also lower administrative burden, as the "easy" students are less likely to get in major trouble, are less likely to need involvement of the school and child protected services in their lives, the teachers go to court as a witness in child abuse cases less, etc. And of course, you can always simply pay teachers less than in municipal schools - which is one of the claims of the author as well. And the last claim the author made is that a lot of these companies just hire some under-qualifiied teachers whenever they can get away with it. I have to admit, the author makes a lot of sense to me.
boxed 6y ago
This is the common wisdom in Sweden. It's also trivially false. Sweden made a bunch of changes at the same time. Why would this one thing be the only thing? And why is our neighbor Finland able to have the best school in Europe and they did the exact same thing? Logic seems to have little place in this discussion. The problem with the Swedish privatization in my opinion is that it managed to enable scientologists and real actual islamists (vetenskapsskolan) to open schools.
- techpression 6y ago
  Finland didn’t do the same thing at all, they modeled their system based of the Swedish one back when it was state driven and science based.
- mongol 6y ago
  It wasn't at the same time. It was approximately at the same time, but parent is right: it _started_ with the handover to municipalities, the privatisation was a few years later

leecarraher 6y ago

The us has a similar profit driven model parallel to state funded schools. While private schools have always been available, only in the last few decades did they move from large monolithic institutions to national corporations. What we tend to call charter schools, profit off of government funding while sometimes putting corporate incentives over student well being. As with public schools, there is a spectrum of excellent to failing schools. But instead of the students success determining profit, the school is often faced with the decision: chase test scores to get more government funding, or file countless, often borderline false IEPs for difficult students and profit off the extra "need based" government funding. This had the effect of replacing the natural spectrum of education with a pigeon hole, excellent high stress test driven school. Or failing, school whose goal is more that of a prison than educational institution.

jschveibinz 6y ago
I would like to address some of the hyperbole in this comment. The US has a majority of publicly-funded primary schools (K-12)—- 16,800 districts by a recent count —- that are primarily funded by local property taxes and run by local school boards. Only 9% of schools are private, and only 7% of public schools are charter schools (semi-private). National funding for primary education in the US is relatively small (roughly 8%) and is mostly tied to special services. The US Dept. of Education is toothless: it is primarily focused on setting policies and administering Title 9. If Sweden has a problem with profiteering in national primary education funding, it is difficult to draw an analogy to US schools just based on the facts stated above. It is true that some US school districts suffer from funding shortfalls due to low local tax base, and the need to show passing grades does drive some schools to “cheat” in order to receive state and federal subsidies, but this is not a universal country-wide problem. The magic solution to educating low-income, socially disadvantaged children who live in very difficult living situations with no assistance from parents has yet to be devised. Or has it? Check out what these folks are doing in Baltimore: https://www.thread.org/ https://www.thread.org/

corty 6y ago

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 and limiting the development of gifted children and imho needs to be dealt with.

UrsaMedius 6y ago
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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- viceroyalbean 6y ago
  The issue, in my experience, is that you have to compromise somewhere. That means either leaving the higher performers to be bored, or leaving the lower performers not achieving the minimum. Neither seems like a desirable outcome.
  - rusabd 6y ago
    Well, we can always f*ck up both groups. It seems this is the current approach.
  - AdrianB1 6y ago
    No, you don't have to compromise at all. Personal experience: I had a great math teacher in mid school; he gathered the best students from the 5 classes in that year in one class and he set the baseline quite high. For the last 2 years half of our class was taking the prizes at all the inter-school competitions in the city and a few of us from the nationals. Most of that class went to the best high schools in the city and most are today great doctors (medical) or scientists. Imagine that did not happen in mid-school and everybody would be an average Joe - that is a loss for humanity, not just for us. Try to read Ender's Game (the book, the movie is terrible). This is very tough, but if you need great people you can help by creating the conditions to grow them. How many Einsteins wasted their lives achieving nothing and how earlier curing diseases and improving technologies was possible if that waste did not happen? The compromise is to waste the resources that we have in the name of equality; we cannot make everyone smart, we only can make them all stupid, so let's do equality.

joshuaissac 6y ago

> 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 left with a more difficult student base This is the gist of the article, that private entities are driving up the government's cost of education by attracting cheaper-to-teach students and then claiming the government funding allocated to those students. The municipality is then left to teach the harder-to-teach students. The funding per student is presumably averaged, so this is similar to the concept of privatising the profits and socialising the losses. But is there anything stopping the municipalities themselves from competing in the same way? A group of municipalities could also pool resources to reduce costs and attract cheaper-to-teach students. I think the article focuses too much on private profit, with only a small paragraph each about how the independent schools are given an unfair information advantage, and how some of them are controlled by religious extremists: > National Agency for Education made all statistics about individual schools secret > a school system that increases segregation and allows jihadist schools run by people with links to Islamism and violent extremism

SiempreViernes 6y ago
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.
- distances 6y ago
  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.
  - SiempreViernes 6y ago

kryogen1c 6y ago

i dont know about the social political education politics of sweden, but the generalized issue is the unanswered question: what is education for? the problem with involving a free market (issues like regulatory capture and misregulation notwithstanding) is that if the product isnt clear, the market output may not be desirable and could be quite malformed. as yogi berra said, if you dont know where youre going, you might not get there. education serves at least 4 purposes: -socialized child care -socialized child feeding -vocational training -general education point four is not well defined and point three is often never defined (who's whole education track is special built for a job they are guaranteed?) given these parameters, what is the expected output of a free market optimization? as we'd say about bad calculations in the navy: garbage in, garbage out.

bjornsing 6y ago

> While schools and colleges are sounding the alarm about declining knowledge results, joy grades are rising, as grades have become a competitive tool on the market. This in my opinion is the main problem. Take this "marketing tool" away from the private schools, and the rest of the problems are fixable (e.g. with diversified pupil compensation). But when you let a private business both grade themselves and sell entry to (free!) university, you will quickly have massive problems... Up until the 70-ties or so there was a separate government agency responsible for final exams and grades. If we want to keep private schools (and I think we should at least try), then we need to reinstate that separation of education and evaluation, urgently. Problem is we now have a large swath of middle class parents who feel that they've been very smart and ensured a great future for their children by choosing the right school for them (and at least subconsciously they understand that the main reason is the inflated grades). They don't want that privilege taken away. There is no limit to the hypocrisy many people can accept if they feel it benefits their kids. Source: I'm Swedish, but I don't have kids so not super knowledgeable. Just my impression after following the debate and talking to friends with kids.

bjeds 6y ago
I sort of agree with what you are saying (I'm also Swedish) but I think the incentives are different, and due to the American dominance of Hacker News readers it's worth to clear up: Swedish middle class parents do not choose "good schools" because they want a "great education" for their kids as a competitive advantage... in the sense of a well-off American parent want their kids to go to Harvard or MIT or similar. Swedish middle class parents choose "not-bad schools" (not the same as "good schools") because they want to shelter their kids from trouble and from problems, for example from the social issues from failed integration of immigrants. So it's more about avoiding trouble and "white flight", than the education itself.
- logicchains 6y ago
  The same is true in Australia: parents choose "not-bad" schools to minimize the chance of their kids being knifed or beaten up by other kids. But it's not due to immigration, instead just to "white trash" for lack of a better word raising violent, substance-abusing children.

acd 6y ago

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.

kakoni 6y ago
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.
- distances 6y ago
  > Pretty sure they have private venture backed school system in mind. Would you have something to back this assumption up?
  - SiempreViernes 6y ago
    There is their general intention to privatize everything possible because they oppose "big state"?
    - distances 6y ago
      Who is against "big state" in Finland, are you referring to the National Coalition Party? Specifically, I've never heard of anyone wanting to privatise the school system so I'd like to get something that substantiates these claims. Otherwise it's just a textbook example of FUD.
  - kakoni 6y ago
    Sure. These links are in Finnish [1] https://www.kokoomusnuoret.fi/kannanotot/2015/05/suomi-tarvitsee-maksullisia-kouluja/ https://www.kokoomusnuoret.fi/kannanotot/2015/05/suomi-tarvi... [2] https://www.verkkouutiset.fi/pitaako-vanhempien-saada-valita-lastensa-koulu-paattajilta-yllattavia-kannanottoja-41030/#39059280 https://www.verkkouutiset.fi/pitaako-vanhempien-saada-valita...

lordnacho 6y ago

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 arrange that. If your kid is doing well, they could do less well than their potential, which might again require more attention. Ordinary independent schools still have some of these pressures, esp wrt to booting out failing kids, but they don't have an expectation of leaving resources for profits. What you're really buying with tuition fees is other parents. Other people who are also signalling, by burning a year's rent, that they value education and will make sure their kids are focused on doing things like reading and numbers.

lr4444lr 6y ago
Your supposition is logical, but the reality is, budget directors, chancellors, and politicians are all under tremendous pressure to stem education costs in the public sector, and it has a lot of impact in what's done or not done. That's why laws guaranteeing the right to education, particularly special education, are important.
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
> 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.
Grustaf 6y ago
The best thing about the Swedish system is that it also ruins the public schools. All schools get paid per student, so public schools have also taken to using marketing and non-education related ways to attract students, such as "cool" designs, free ipads etc.

deleted 6y ago

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imtringued 6y ago

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

Grustaf 6y ago
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.

Clewza313 6y ago

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

ahendriksen 6y ago
Grade inflation: the same test outcome is rewarded with progressively higher grades as time goes on and pressure increases to improve grades.
- JJMcJ 6y ago
  Colleges too, in the USA. Parents don't pay $60K/year for their kids to get Cs.

alvarlagerlof 6y ago

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.

SiempreViernes 6y ago
Wow, do you at least have as mc donalds nearby so you can get a few of their cheap "child sized" burgers? Hope you can find a better school!
- vagrantJin 6y ago
  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.
  - alvarlagerlof 6y ago
    We actually have McDonald's and Max on the list and there's a whole bunch of people who eat there very often.

amadeuspagel 6y ago

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?

FabHK 6y ago
Agreed, arrogating Émile Zola's battle cry for yourself is in my view overreaching. On the other hand, as Wikipedia notes, "J'accuse! has become a common expression of outrage and accusation against someone powerful", so I think it has become more generic, and doesn't contain the implicit accusation of anti-semitism anymore. > wouldn't we expect it to actually lead to worse results then that of other countries? It might take many years to manifest itself (at university, PISA study, etc.), though. As such, an early warning by a practitioner that has first hand experience with what's happening in schools right now strikes me as valuable.
- username90 6y ago
  Sweden has had private schools for decades now though, and results are improving since the last reform. Also I don't think private schools is a big deal, good students avoid them since they all have really bad reputation. Nobody will think "Wow, you went to $private_school?" instead it is more like "You went to that school huh, are you an idiot?". There are a few exceptions, but only for the few schools that were private before the reforms this article talks about and they take in so few students that it wouldn't show up in statistics.
  - Grustaf 6y ago
    > "You went to that school huh, are you an idiot?" Which schools have this reputation?
mongol 6y ago

Ottolay 6y ago

As someone who is not all that familiar with education policy, is this basically analogous to for profit charter schools in the US?

bjeds 6y ago
Roughly: Education is tax funded so each kid has a pile of money in the local government budget. The school where the kid ends up, gets this pile of money. The kids (or rather the parents) can pick and choose between schools. This naturally leads to a bunch of complexities, for example marketing catering to what the kids think they want (iPads, 3d printers, whatever) instead of what they need. Also, there's an incentive from privately owned schools to use this money as efficiently as possible. (Note: when I say "as efficiently as possible" I try to mean that in a neutral way: if you are reading this and are left-leaning, feel free to interpret that as "the school will cut costs to make a profit" whereas if you are reading this and right-leaning feel free to interpret that as using the budget more efficiently than the government could).

yawaworht1978 6y ago

Holy crap, the homophobic comments about shielding their children from immigrants children/issues. How dare you speak in the name of other people and get a grip and grow a pair. Jesus this is Sweden and Australia we are talking about, not a war zone. You do not know the really bad places on this planet. Let your children learn conflict resolution, they are not gonna be assassinated in school. Or well, pay for these useless schools ripping you off if you think the kids there are all saints and angels.

username90 6y ago

KTH tests engineering students math abilities by giving new students the same test every year. There is nothing gained or lost from this test so nobody studied for it. Anyway, this gives us a reasonable trend in how well students know the basics, and it shows that students are getting better and not worse right now. The worst class was the one starting 2007. https://www.kth.se/aktuellt/nyheter/trenden-har-vant-mattekunskaper-okar-1.692717 https://www.kth.se/aktuellt/nyheter/trenden-har-vant-matteku...

JorgeGT 6y ago
Note that KTH is an elite institution so there is a selection bias. It's like saying education in America must be going well because new MIT students are getting better.
- bjeds 6y ago
  Now you are exaggerating. KTH is of course a good school for Swedish standards but calling it elite is weird. In what way would you say that KTH is elite, because I genuinely do not understand how the word "elite" applies to this school? I'm a bit out of touch, but of all schools in Sweden, the only I'd call elite - by the common meaning of the word - is Operahögskolan (I think it's called, the Opera school) and possibly Stockholm School of Economics and the medical schools of the larger older universities + Karolinska. Those places are highly competitive. Everyone I know, from the little village I grew up in Sweden, who wanted to go to KTH, did so.
  - JorgeGT 6y ago
    Maybe elite is the wrong term, I'm not a native speaker... what I meant is that KTH is probably the best technological university in Sweden and one of the best tech unis in Europe overall, so the math level of its admitted students is not necessarily representative of the general level.
    - Grustaf 6y ago
      It is the best technological university in Sweden, but it's also one of the biggest universities, if not the biggest. It accepts a lot more than the elite, in any sense of that word.

AlgorithmicTime 6y ago

I mean, the obvious solution would be to stop working so hard to educate the ineducatable.

einpoklum 6y ago

> In the rest of the world, it is unreasonable for limited companies to make unregulated profits on tax money I envy the author for living in a country where one can imagine that commercial companies don't make unregulated profits on tax tax money.

deleted 6y ago

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atomicson 6y ago

When we put so much trust to the government, another type of organization of human being. We give them so much power to manage all things and we loose control of them. They hide something from us for their own benefits. Some of them run on their own personal or group interests. Take them down all over the world. These elites are the real parasites of civilization.

japhyr 6y ago

For anyone interested in this issue in the US, there's an excellent new book out called A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, by Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire. It traces the push and pull between the promise of quality education for the masses through public education, and the attempt to extract as much profit as possible from schools that's been going on for a very long time. They dispel many myths that persist about public education, and connect current privatization pushes to decades-long attempts to undermine public education. https://www.amazon.com/Wolf-Schoolhouse-Door-Dismantling-Education/dp/1620974940/ https://www.amazon.com/Wolf-Schoolhouse-Door-Dismantling-Edu...

deleted 6y ago

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Grustaf 6y ago

> 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...

jokethrowaway 6y ago
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.
- Grustaf 6y ago
  > I'm pro privatisation in general because, in my experience, government-run institutions waste more money and provide a worse service. Of course that is generally true, but some things are natural monopolies. For example the railroads. If there is no effective competition, private companies have no real incentive to improve service, but they do have an incentive to lower their costs, often leading to worse service.

nearbuy 6y ago

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.

jelliclesfarm 6y ago
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.
- Grustaf 6y ago
  In Sweden all schools have to accept everyone, you definitely can't discriminate on social or financial grounds or even based on grades.

JJMcJ 6y ago

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.

IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago

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 ?

sha1337 6y ago

I would like to give some context to everyone who doesn't come from Sweden. >The following article [...] appeared in the Swedish publication Expressen. Expressen is a known right-leaning news publisher. They are the Fox News of Sweden, you should keep that in mind. Here is an example of the kind of trash you find in Expressen (taken from the article): >I accuse you, the Sweden Democrats [...] you support a school system that increases segregation and allows jihadist schools run by people with links to Islamism and violent extremism They're talking about muslim schools. What is said doesn't accurately represent reality nor is it non-partisan (obviously). Sweden Democrats are the most right-leaning party in the Swedish Parliament, they don't like muslims (to put it mildly). Yet the author is blaming them for not going hard enough on the muslims community in Sweden. It's a bit of a trend now with right-wing extremists in Sweden to focus on attacking muslim schools, as if having Arabic/Quran lessons apart from the regular school curriculum is equivalent to training a militia. This sort of language is not unlike what you would expect a neo-nazi to say about jews, that they are inherently a harm and seek to subvert society, because reasons...

Grustaf 6y ago
Expressen might be as trustworthy as Fox News, but it's not right leaning in any meaningful sense of the word. As to islamism, you are aware that they recently closed down Vetenskapsskolan because after a number of islamist scandals. For example, it turned out they had been hiring people returning fighting for ISIS.
- sha1337 6y ago
  I think truthfulness is a bigger issue than right vs left, if they were truthful I would personally not care about their political leaning. Expressen is right-leaning though, they may not be far-right (like Avpixlat), but they're certainly leaning right. >For example, it turned out they had been hiring people returning fighting for ISIS. They(in plural?) had been hiring people (again in plural?). You have to be accurate here, especially when it comes articles that are demonizing an entire community. Even if it so happened that one employee had links to ISIS, it does not by default make the school administration responsible for what the employee did. For example, if a pedophile teacher gets caught, it's hardly reasonable to blame the school (unless the school administration knew and ignored it).

valuearb 6y ago

Weird that she spends her vitriol on how the teachers are treated, without showing any reduction in school quality.