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What you're saying, especially the part about "slightly better organised and attract students that care enough about their education" is talking point rhethoric
by yoelo 6y ago
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?).
- Grustaf 6y agoIn the Swedish system, all schools cost the same: 0. So there is no reason to target specifically wealthy students, all students are worth the same to you as school owner. In fact, they can't even accept students based on grades, there are only 4 criteria they are allowed to use when selecting students: location, time in queue, siblings in the school and whether you went to pre-school there. So what you end up with are students with parents that have enough forethought to put your name down early on. > You can't "optimize" what's essentially a service institution. I'm not sure what you mean by this, obviously you could in theory most definitely optimise the education. That is what private schools here in Denmark tend to do.
- bjoli 6y agoYes, but no: - The schools get a fixed amount of money per student. - The single largest predictor of school success is education level of the parents. - most for profit schools are in areas with higher education.
- Grustaf 6y agoI'm not sure what you are arguing for or against here. I agree with all these points. But it is still the case that a lot of the students will not be local, and the majority of the local kids will not go to the school, they will go to the local public school.* The main reason these schools have better students is that you need to make an active choice to go there, and you need to do that a long time in advance. If you don't, you end up in a public school. This of course means that students from more motivated households go to these schools. Not wealthier students or even necessarily smarter students. * There have been cases recently where it seems that the private school has bribed the public school system to close the local school, but in general the public school will remain and most of the local kids will go there.