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.
Thank you for your reply, I didn't expect I'd find a comment from an actual student of these schools here at HN. Your perspective is valuable.
If you follow Swedish media you probably know there's a large discussion/controversy right now about high school students (and younger kids) changing their behavior to avoid crime/trouble. For example see this recent article at SVT: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/man-maste-vara-pa-sin-vak...
What's your take? Is this a problem in your school as well, or peer group? I'm genuinely curious: I'm old enough to never naturally meet people your age, but I'm not old enough to have kids or relatives your age.
I'm not one to go to parties drinking or smoking illegal stuff, although this is very common in certain groups. So I can't comment on that. I've actually avoided that on purpose because it would worsen my mental state with my diagnosies. But I guess that criminal stuff would happen in those groups.
Problem is many have experienced even worse schools (and there are many) so they're comparatively happy with this. It won't happen. I've also experienced a non-profit teacher co-operative. It was leaps and bounds better than this.
That suggestion defeats the purpose. The thing is schools are supposed to provide meals to students (at no cost), so if you're bringing your own lunch you're not saving your money, you saving the school money.
If you take the money that the school gives you and make your own lunch for less money than the restaurants charge, that's better than a free lunch, since you have more money.
Only on the summer as the school does not allow eating anything other than what the cafeteria serves in the buildings. The lunch cards are restricted to certain restaurants only.
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
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 than McD, as that's about the limit of what 55 SEK will pay for in terms of street food.
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 of the kids to have hot fresh homemade lunches delivered. They felt it was better to feed them varied and fresh home cooked meals even if it had to be outsourced
Because it’s India and the cuisine is very regional, all the parents spoke the same language and had the same food habits.
Also..it was usually a good side gig for housewives who had a little extra time and had cooking skills. They are not competing in the market or with restaurants. They just like cooking and kids. I knew that this lady sometimes made extra food for kids who couldn’t afford homemade fresh lunches.
Of course...there were no overheads like incorporating it as a business or paying taxes or working in a paid commissary kitchen or bookkeeping etc...the moms just paid one of their neighbours who was also their friend. It was trust and word of mouth. No one was going to write a bad Yelp review for over spiced curry. So there’s that. It was just ingredients plus a profit margin as far as the housewife/caterer was concerned.
Childhood eating habits shape healthier diets in adulthood. Maybe someone from Sweden in HN can run with this as a startup?
I was specifically suggesting for the non cafeteria ones that the the parent comment from a current student. Not to replace existing programs. I went to a private school. Public schools had free schools lunches in India too. But even then if parents could afford it, they always sent home cooked packed lunches.
Because the population is so culturally and linguistically diverse, there were as many types of regional cuisines too. Especially in urban areas where people migrate for jobs.
Indians can be fiercely protective about their language and cuisine because as cultural markers that are constantly under threat to be homogenized as a ‘single Indian culture’, parents liked to start early with food and language spoken at home. This was my observation from living in India many years ago. Perhaps this has changed now.
Also making the weekly menu for the upcoming school lunches was the fun part of bonding with my grandmother. That was also how I learnt to love food and cooking. I don’t think I would have first gravitated towards food and then later into farming if it hadn’t been for the hours I spent with my grandmother planning those lunches.
I realize that there is a little bit of nostalgia in my reply but it is also a good business opportunity with healthy side effect for hungry kids who must have access to nutritious and healthy meals. I am sure that opinion is global and won’t change with time.
> I was specifically suggesting for the non cafeteria ones that the the parent comment from a current student
And I'm saying that this category of school essentially doesn't exist. It's not that most schools have cafeterias. All schools do, except for a handful.
> Maybe someone from Sweden in HN can run with this as a startup?
I like the way you think.
In my country the community would open tons of cheap food stalls that could get students decent food. It also happens that simple bean or chicken briyanis were a hit.
I guess Im finding it difficult to digest the suggestion of burgers as a lunch meal when food really shouldn't be an issue in SWE. Maybe its embarrasing to not eat out?
I can relate to this. We also had trucks and push carts that served quick take out meals near schools but because that was always discouraged by my grandparents. If food wasn’t pre packed or made fresh right in front of our eyes(like dosa and idly in south of India), the general rule is to not to buy anything from food carts.
99.9% of Swedish schools have free school cafeterias. It's a deeply ingrained concept that I believe Sweden invented. This school is an extreme outlier.
Well yes, if you go to a school that thinks so little of their students that they try to get away with not giving them proper food there are other issues too.
And supposedly the entire point of the private schools is to give you freedom of choice, so why would you object to a student changing schools?
Yes, eating McD on a daily basis is not only boring but downright unhealthy. I remember eating at McD when in college because it was perceivably cheaper and while I was enjoying the food when I was hungry I always felt not so good afterwards. I haven’t touched any MCD in 10 years and won’t do anytime soon unless there’s an emergency
I find it weird that we have fast food restaurants on the list too. Even weirder is that they compensate with "healthier" restaurants that are so far away we don't have time to get there.
I don't think its weird. Its just a function of supply and demand : vendors following the customers, not the other way around.
In the US, Customers are college students, and they don't have money for restaurants. That's why you have pizza joints near campuses, and not healthy options instead. I suspect this is more of the same here.
> 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.
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.
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.
The same is true in the UK. One of the highest rates of bullying in Europe (the other big one is Finland). Somehow, one of the highest rates of sexual violence against girls in schools too (this is globally, so including developing countries).
Obviously, this problem is multi-faceted, the best solution is everyone just going to a nice school. But part of the problem in the UK was that comprehensive education is very ideological, and the belief was: comp schools are so bad because all the good students go to grammar schools. This did not turn out to be accurate.
But London (which is currently in the midst of a knife-crime epidemic) was one of the worst places, and got significantly better due to more investment, and more exclusions/discipline. For example, some schools will get teachers to walk at-risk students directly to their homes from schools. And ofc, the exclusions have caused outcry (funnily enough, there is a split on this between unions, who hate it, and teachers, who quite like it). Incidentally, Glasgow also used to have a serious knife crime problem, and they got over this with enhanced stop-and-search...unf, this is politically impossible in London. There are solutions to all these problems though.
I grew up in the UK, and knew lots of smart kids now working deadend jobs who got chewed up and spit out by schools (almost always the issue was bullying, and schools not removing people who were behaving, in a non-school context, criminally). It is a seriously bad situation imo.
Yeah, but while "bogan" connotates unsophistication, bad fashion sense and the like, bogans are usually portrayed as somewhat likeable and not actively criminal.
We do the same here in the states. Some folks pay for private schools so their kids don't have to be exposed to perceived riff raff, while others choose to live in more expensive neighborhoods where the only benefit is often that there is less riff raff in the public schools.
Would that explain why my bachelor students were so unbelievable inept at emotionally dealing with and resolving conflicts when I taught at university there?
Haha I don't know where you're from but Swedish people are often stereotypically bad at both dealing with emotions and resolving conflicts. "Van der" = Gonna guess you are Dutch? Well Swedish people are, as you know well yourself, the opposite of the Dutch in how to handle things.
You guessed right! Yeah, I know the stereotypes but the thing is that I already had studied a master in Sweden for two years myself, and thought I had gotten used to communicate "like a Swede", but I still was surprised how much more fragile the bachelor students were than anticipated
Dutch and Finnish are known for being frank and to the point which is why they are quite well regarded in Sweden.
Swedish is more conflict averse, always trying to protect each other and often failing because what happens is that people read in between the lines instead, which is much worse.
How could you learn that from teaching a course? Did you create conflict among student and note how everything became chaos? Or do you just mean that a few complained about grades?
If the course is interactive and not just a lecture where students listen silently then you can easily observe what is going on. In college we have something called "seminars" where the teacher or teacher assistant work on problems and projects with small groups of students, that is highly interactive.
Neither. It was a design bachelor with group projects. You get to see a lot of interpersonal dynamics, and you also have a lot of direct interactions with your students.
I assumed you taught some technical class since this was HN, but if you didn't then I understand since those programs aren't well regarded in Sweden. If it isn't business, medical, law or STEM then it is almost surely ill regarded. I'm not talking badly about those fields in general, just that Sweden doesn't have any good programs for the so the students you get there are really poor.
I can agree to some extent, but wait until the middle class kids don’t perform well enough to make it into the middle class... Problem is: in a fair system that will happen, and many of those parents will fight tooth and nail to prevent it.
Funny you should mention the schools grading themselves. I'm a student at an AcadeMedia school, and they gave us a form to rate our education experience, along with this instruction on how to rate. For non-English speakers, they are basically asking us to rate outside of a linear 1-10 scale an instead follow theirs (which is biased towards higher ratings) presumably to look good on internal reviews. If this is somehow shown to their investors, I think the media should take this up.
The two main ways to get into university in Sweden is through your grades or through a national test (Högskoleprovet ~ The university test). From your grades you calculate a score and then people are accepted into programmes at uni based on that score.
The grading has seen a lot of debate over the last 10 years or so from when it changed (IG/G/VG/MVG --> A-F scale). The way things were graded in the old system had national guidelines, but I think teachers were supposed to take a holistic view on the students performance. Essentially, teachers gave an overall grade. With the new system there were two things that were rather unintuitive. MVG was the highest grade in the previous system, but this does not translate well to an A. Under the previous systems a few programmes required MVG in every subject to compete with other students. So as far as I know the new system required a grade "above" MVG. So that is one thing that makes it different. But also, the new grading system should grade you high if you scored high in ALL criteria for that subject. You were only supposed to be able get one grade higher than your lowest criteria. Of course, a lot of teachers thought "Well IG should translate to F, G should be E-D, MVG should be A. And then I'll just grade like in the previous system.". I think this line of thinking has created a lot of joy grades and unfortunately locked a lot of hard working kids out of their fair spot at uni while letting less hard-working people in.
I know some people who barely got into uni from their grades but turned out to be some of the best performers among their peers because they got fair grades while others got joy grades.
Anecdotal but my relative is a teacher. The principal of their school just told them straight up that they need to improve the grades no matter what so they can compete with other schools.
It’s kind of a open secret that if you go to a bad school it will be easier to get a good grade to get into university but harder to pass university.
If you are a glass-half-full person (I am), it's fair to call it grade inflation. In the sense of an unfortunate (or natural) the-standards-keep-chaning-over-time and suddenly people have better grades than 10 years ago, but the same knowledge.
If you are glass-half-empty person, you can interpret is as a sort of implied "if you pick my school (which means I get money) I will make sure your kid get good grades".
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.
Yes and no. Many aren't less 'gifted' just less able - they don't have the right language background for school, dont have the easy ability to study at home, etc.
'Grammar schools' (or something similar of a different name) are reasonably common in UK and its colonies and attempt what you are asking for - with very well documented positives and negatives.
There is definitely a massive issue of equality where children feel they aren't in the 'good' school this becomes an excuse for not bothering with school and then life. Equal education brings a lot of benefits to society at large.
>This is severely holding back and limiting the development of gifted children and imho needs to be dealt with.
The article describes how for profit schools specifically pick "gifted" (aka easy to teach) children and then cut teaching staff to take the difference as profit. Yes, these students will still get better grades and thus make the for profit school look better than the public school but they absolutely fail to cater to the needs of "gifted" children.
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 wealth. Schools should treat poor and rich children the same.
However, schools should never treat stupid and intelligent children the same. Not everyone is cut out to be a rocket surgeon. But your argument means that we should hold back all future rocket surgeons and bring them to a lower level of privilege, i.e. dumb them down. This is neither in the interest of the children (stupid as well as intelligent ones) nor is it in the interest of society. We do need rocket surgeons...
However, schools should never treat stupid and intelligent children the same. Not everyone is cut out to be a rocket surgeon. But your argument means that we should hold back all future rocket surgeons and bring them to a lower level of privilege, i.e. dumb them down. This is neither in the interest of the children (stupid as well as intelligent ones) nor is it in the interest of society. We do need rocket surgeons...
I agree that this can be a difficult balance to strike. But I think it's also important to keep the door open for children who mature a bit later. Stamping someone as "not gifted" by excluding them from a "gifted" group sure seems like it would cause problems, especially for younger children. Of course it's a difficult practical problem to solve; to give every child challenges on their current level.
Also, while there are surely variations in intelligence that are "from birth", I do not know how that compares to all the variations caused by different educational privileges; having parents that have a lot of time to read for/with the child etc. It sort of comes down to "equality vs. equity" I suppose - and that is not a simple question.
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.
Paying teachers more is beside the point. A well-paid teacher isn't suddenly a better teacher just because it earns more money.
The things we should invest in are more teachers, smaller and more separated classes and better teachers' education. Only the last one correlates (somewhat) with teachers' salaries.
How much of a difference do teachers make in the public school system? I don't mean teacher vs no teacher, but good teacher vs average teacher. The topics in the public school system are not set by the teachers themselves - they have to teach what has been decided elsewhere. A good teacher can engage students better, but how much of that is the teacher's ability as opposed to the teacher and students happening to get along? How much of it is good students self-selecting themselves into academically better schools, therefore having better peers?
Asked in a different way: if we paid (all) teachers 3x as we do right now, would we observe significant long-term improvements in students?
This is odd - I am not using code blocks, I am just typing in the text box to reply. I thought it looked like code as a way of showing my comments. I really don't know why it happens, I will look and see if it's somewhere in the settings.
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.
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.
If I'm understanding your story correctly your math teacher did the opposite of what the person I responded to said - he separated out the high performers, creating an environment that allows them to thrive and achieve high results. This is great, but what about the ones who weren't picked into the high performing class?
There is nothing saying you can't have good classes for both high and low performers, but with schools that have limited resources it often works out to a poor medium where no one really thrives (hence the caveat of 'in my experience' in my comment).
The ones that weren't picked in the high performing class had the same teacher, but they only studied what was in the standard manual, they did not go above and beyond what they were capable of. At the same time they were not pulling back the ones more capable.
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’
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.
this is not out of the norm in NYC, especially at the low income level.
Take exhibit A - success academies chain. There are about 47 in total , most around NYC. They are an independent school which only the poor can get into. So it is private but paid with tax dollars. Because it is taxpayer-funded, once you apply, they can't discriminate - the only requirement to acceptance is that you are poor.
Yet the best students go there, and the school is so good that if it were a separate education system, it would be the best performing education system in the entire United States.
How do they do it ? Simple - they screen parents. They make the bar really high so only the most motivated parents will jump all the hoops to get their kids in.
And there is the problem - it is not the profit, but rather the fact that we refuse to accept that some kids are in a better situation to be educated than others. Whether due to better home environment, raw talent, good base, not sure. However, refusing to deal with this fact, only hurts kids.
How ? Well, the alternative to Success Academies is no 10,000 poor kids receiving elite education. Let us dump those kids back to the system of mediocrity where they were condemned until 15 or so years ago.
That's what equality really means unfortunately - everyone getting equally mediocre government-sanctioned education
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.
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?).
In 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.
I'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.
Now go and have a look where the schools are located. For-profit schools are more often located in areas where education level is higher. Less money spent on educating kids means more profit ina system where each student gets a fixed amount.
I'm not sure what your point is. Putting a school in a middle class area rather than a ghetto doesn't make it "elite". Especially when any kid can go there, regardless of where they live.
I am not saying that the demographics in free schools are the same as in public schools, or that there is no correlation between where the students in a given free school live.
I'm sure they tend to skew locally, if that is your point, but in any case they skew much less locally than the local public school. So the reason a given free school has better grades than the public school down the street is not its location.
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.
Corrected for socioeconomic factors free schools do worse (as per the latest OECD report). One can have many things to say about that way of counting, but if we are to have a system with so many apparent problems, shouldnt we at least get something for it?
And I think that is where the problem lays: we have publicly funded for profit schools. The only way they can make money is by not letting taxpayer money for education go to education. All my other points stem from this.
It is pretty telling about the free school interest group's response to the report of equivalence ("likvärdigheten") of the Swedish school system: they hated all suggestions the report made to make the situation better. Even pretty benign ones like mandatory school selection, removing queued days as grounds for selection and so on. My theory is because they know those things are what makes it possible for them to pocket such a large part of the money they get.
The problem, however, isn't any individual company. It is the law that allows it. Which makes it even more provoking: we have had the numbers for 20 years. Looking at the statistics since 2000 you can see in which direction things were heading. Why didn't anyone go "this is not what we want. Let's re-evaluate".
The obvious solution is to abolish the possibility to make a profit. I think they should allow private schools, let them charge fees, select students the way they want to but simply not allow any profits. That system works here in Denmark and public schools don’t seem to have suffered from it.
This is not always the case. There's a growing number of states in the US that allow state education funding to follow a student wherever they go.
Wherever these laws arise, profit-based schools appear and attempt to draw in as many students as they can. Often times it's the least educated, least privileged people who are pulled into these programs. There is little or no regulation on claims these schools make in their marketing materials, so they promise the world and then dump students into large classes led by gig-economy "teachers".
I think the thesis of Senator Warren's book The Two-Income Trap (2004) is that in the US, where you don't have the problem with profit-driven schools (or at least had it much less back then), you instead have the problem that the middle classes will flee to the suburbs to get their kids into good schools (or, as another poster has put it, "not-bad" schools). The schools may be public, but as long as you need a certain income to live in the district, that serves the same purpose.
When my daughter was diagnosed with autism three weeks plenty of for profit options. We ended up putting her in a charter school because it was far more flexible and attentive to our needs than public school was, where all decisions seemed to revolve around what was best for the school, not our child.
School should also teach kids that they live in a complex society, where people have different backgrounds and, yes, different skill sets. I'm afraid that relegating "more gifted" kids (whatever this means) into a world of their own is not only harmful to those who are left out, but to them as well.
I was trying to prompt the obviously necessary reflection on what you said.
But I'll make it explicit, if irony is considered too snarky: Exposing more gifted children to less gifted ones might be beneficial in small doses, it isn't in general. One group will always be detrimental to the other:
Because the more gifted children get bored, learn to minimax everything and to procrastinate because nothing really requires their full application and attention. Maybe you give them harder tasks, but seeing that in the presence of the less gifted children they can also get by with less work if they just play dumb, they will learn to adapt and play dumb. Tons of psychological problems like procrastination and impostor syndrome (that HN likes to complain about) are caused and worsened by these mechanisms.
If you do the converse and do your teaching on a level appropriate for the more gifted children, the less gifted ones will be in over their heads. They won't learn most of the curriculum, but they will learn their inferiority and helplessness. They will also learn to hate the more gifted children, and seek an outlet through violent means if possible. I suppose a good part of the HN population has been on the receiving end of that one.
If you need examples where coeducation is never done, look no further than the school's choir, orchestra or sports teams. If you aren't in the top group of abilities for those activities you are either not selected, or selected for the second team. With good reason.
> But I'll make it explicit, if irony is considered too snarky: Exposing more gifted children to less gifted ones might be beneficial in small doses, it isn't in general. One group will always be detrimental to the other
I do see your point, but it's a matter of tradeoffs. Not exposing different children to each other may benefit the best ones (and maybe even the others, who knows), but may also foster a classist view of society. Similarly, we started coeducating male and female pupils because the previous system was seen as fostering a sexist view of society.
> If you need examples where coeducation is never done, look no further than the school's choir, orchestra or sports teams.
That actually strenghtens the point though, doesn't it? You can also have chess teams, science clubs, and other activities which cater to the best pupils, while keeping the current educational model.
Coeducation and joined competitions still aren't a thing in sports, even chess. It isn't a problem to separate, if there really is a difference imho.
> That actually strenghtens the point though, doesn't it? You can also have chess teams, science clubs, and other activities which cater to the best pupils, while keeping the current educational model.
No, it doesn't. If you really would go through with that, you are making the better pupils waste their time in regular boring classes with the same effects on them I've described, and then make them take more clubs in addition to the boring stuff. And it will be quite a lot of clubs, one for each subject basically. That wastes school resources as well as pupils' time. And it reinforces to the pupils that being smart is a curse that will make you waste extra time in school just to not be bored out of your scull watching the worse pupils scratch their heads over trivialities.
If you want to do it right, you need alternative regular classes or alternative schools for better pupils.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure what you are claiming here. Are you saying that I'm wrong in questioning calling KTH "elite" because I used one anecdote in a larger argument?
You can look up the admission statistics yourself: it's very easy to get in to KTH. Maybe there are some programs that are more competitive than others.
When I finished high school, the admission criteria for example Electrical Engineering was roughly "you need a non-failing grade in all high school courses". How is that "elite"? Compare with medical school where it used to be "you need the best grade in every single course otherwise you're not getting in". Or the Opera school where there's an admission test in front of an audience.
I can guarantee that MIT is more difficult to get into than KTH.
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.
You need to read the whole thread for context. The original post claims education quality in Sweden deteriorated. username90 argues it didn't, using unchanged KTH test results as support. JorgeGT says KTH is an elite institution so there is a selection bias. You disagree, saying that KTH is not an elite institution. I'm saying the selection bias is still present because KTH students are not a representative sample.
In this context it does not matter how elite KTH is. It only matters whether KTH students on average are materially different from general population.
When I entered KTH you needed top grades in all subjects to be admitted to engineering physics. Electrical engineering was probably not even the third hardest to enter.
Thanks.
I contacted the author of that article and he gave me an updated graph. It, of course, doesn't have the numbers for 2020, as the test wasn't taken because of COVID-19.
Den mån 15 feb. 2021 kl 07:55 skrev Hans Thunberg:
Hej Kim! Förkunskapsprovet genomfördes även vid utbildningstart i augusti 2017, 2018 och 2019. I höstas blev det ingenting p ga av pandemien (vilket ju verkligen är synd – man hade vilja veta hur distansundervisning som började redan våren -20 påverjade förkunskaperna)
De förbättrade resultaten från 2015 och 2016 höll väsentligen i sig de tre följande åren, här är ett diagram som visar lösningsfrekvensen på förkunskapsprovet hos antagna till civilingenjörsutbildningarna vid KTH 1997 – 2019.
The only acceptance criteria is grades, or a local SAT/ACT like test but without essays or other harder to grade parts. It's language, logic and math. See more here [0]. You don't get in because you're good at sports, it's not even a consideration.
I've taken a similar test at another university in Sweden and truly nobody studies for it, in the introduction week it was simply done at one point as part of the introduction curriculum, without even being mentioned beforehand.
So, it's a fairly consistent sample of people aiming for a STEM education.
Nobody studies for it since nobody knows they will take the test. It is marked as a blank spot on their calendar and people gets surprised when a test gets handed out. Then they quickly forget they ever took a test since so much happens in the first days of new students.
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.
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/
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.
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 ?
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.
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?
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.
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.
Swedish PISA results have fallen continuously in the past years. Last result showed a break from that but later it turned out that many students which could have been expected to test poorly were dissuaded from participating. So the result from that year is in question. There is huge concern in Sweden over the state of the schooling system. It is complex because so much have changed over the past 30 years. It is usually not to recommend when trying trying improve something to throw it all up in the air at once, but that is more or less what has been done.
> many students which could have been expected to test poorly were dissuaded from participating. So the result from that year is in question
You mean newly arrived immigrants. They would greatly decrease the results depending on how many were excluded, yes, but PISA makes a distinction between immigrants and natives anyway so just look at the natives results and you still see a strong positive trend.
Also you could argue that immigrant performance isn't a good indicator of the school system of a country, only an indicator of what kind of immigrants they take in. So the only real number from PISA is actually the performance of students who grew up there and got their entire education in the country.
I don't think that distinction is valuable. Immigrants that come to live here will need to be well equipped for adult life just like native Swedes are. That is why the downward trend has been so worrying. If the young generation in average has faired less well than previous generations, then that is worrying for our society.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
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.
> Uh, are you suggesting the municipalities should just deny education to the unprofitable students?
I did not suggest anything like that anywhere in my comment. Municipalities have to teach hard/expensive students in either scenario. Based on the article, they are leaving easy/cheap students on the table for the private sector, who can profit from scale and from the students being cheaper to teach.
There will be independent schools that only accept easy students whether the municipalities like it or not. The choice municipalities have is whether to run their own schools attracting such students and socialise some of the profits instead of letting it all go to the private sector.
In some sense it already exists, the kids with severe developmental challenges have their own schools for example.
I guess the real problem is that nobody wants to send their kids to the "cheap" school, which is likely going to be filled with kids from affluent parents because study outcome is to first order just a function of parent income.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
That's a great argument for why the state should do everything and private companies shouldn't exist, but given the historical record of this arrangement, maybe there's something wrong with it?
Private schools have more leverage on whom they will accept as pupils and hence can target an "easier to teach" part of the overall pupil population.
To me the Swedish system is the worst of two worlds: in Germany, there are good public schools for well-performing students; the problem is that affluent parents typically make sure their children are classified as "well-performing" (roughly speaking; there is a lot of wiggle room). This is somewhat unfair, but facilitates to some extent the development of pupils with reasonably high potential. In other Scandinavian countries, the state provides enough resources to have small class sizes in which pupils of all abilities get educated together. This is fair but can hamper the development of high-potential children (teachers still have limited time and attention). In Sweden, the distribution of resources as criticized by the article facilitates that pupils in need don't receive special support and high-potential children get their education in for-profit institutions for pseudo-elites where a teacher is discouraged to give tough feedback because it can hurt the organization's bottom line.
I have no real view on public/private provision of services, but education is an area where I'm not sure how private 'efficiency savings' would exist. The bulk of the costs are salaries and the teacher/pupil ratio is roughly fixed for a given quality of education.
Does anyone have experience of this? Are there actually areas that private enteprise can come in and save money in education?
I think "selection" is the short answer. If you can, by any means, arrange to have a class of better-behaved more-interested children, then you can save money. First, you can pay the teachers less, because the job is much more pleasant.
Second, you can avoid hiring special-ed non-teachers, who (IIRC) are quite numerous in some public school systems (like 1/3 the staff?) but aren't usually counted in the teacher/pupil ratio (because their jobs are different).
You have not visited an American school lately and seen the mindblowing numbers of administrators employed?
Baltimore: "For every student enrolled in City Schools, $1630 goes to administrators" [1]
Even universities have a problem with the administration growing wihtout bounds.
A profit motive can cut down on unneeded administrators. The "misc_costs" can be widly different for different school systems.
Why should a head of a public school each $+100k ? [2] What is it about a standard run-of-the-mill public school that can only be performed by such high earners?
In the US, teacher to student ratios are generally not fixed. One wchool may have 25 to a class. Another 35.
If you can select only high performing students with fewer individual needs, you can increase the number of students without needing additional staff. Likewise, you can higher fewer or no language teachers, special education teachers, etc.
Proven false by Swedish schools, just this week a pretty thorough investigation showed that same result schools in certain cities had almost twice the funding per student compared to others, for no gain.
The municipality can set the rent. I know of cases where:
- it's high to have lower taxes for the rich for no reason, making private schools very competitive because they can just change building.
- it's zero, making it very hard for a good private school to compete because they can't never get the rent to zero on the open market.
Well, the question is really how bad the government run agency is at cost control. Some of them are dangerously bad. Many education administrations waste lots of money on administration, to the detriment of actual education. Many education administrations are run by someone doing a resume-padding exercise. Just because the short-term profit isn't in the company's results doesn't mean no one is taking advantage.
It's usually easy to bring in someone profit-oriented and cut those costs. The bad news is that this doesn't magically make the education provided any better.
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.
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.
This is exactly the topic of a book written about the issue, called "De Lönsamma" (the profitable). Two people from the world of education doing deep dives into the budgets of many municipalities also show infuriatingly poor judgement when allowing a new independent school to establish, with loads of subsidies and taxcuts.
"En bok om varför skolor slåss om elever, och om hur vinster i välfärden bara är en liten del av den diskussion vi behöver ha."
(A book about why schools fight over students, and how profits in public service is only a small part of the discussion we need to have.)
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.
Because all the other "good" students are there and all the "bad" students are in the public schools. You don't want your kid to be surrounded by "bad" kids, do you? (I'm not serious)
In Germany, public school teachers are state officials, meaning they are completely impossible to get rid of (even after some kinds of criminal convictions). We literally had a teacher who wasn't allowed to teach the younger classes anymore, because he was prone to rudely abuse them. He taught the older pupils instead, who were thought to be more resilient to his abuse. Another teacher (biology and chemistry) was deeply religious and had a funny way (to say it mildly) of teaching evolution, procreation and sex ed. Which lead to her just being assigned chemistry classes, where she then had to limit herself to teaching photosynthesis "as the lord created it"...
Place an efficiency factor on not only teacher selection but on the curriculum which I would argue is more important than quality teachers. A well implemented curriculum with good teacher support is the biggest quality differential between schools of similar demographics. When I say curriculum I mean everything from books, to teacher hiring, results monitoring, and teacher support.
See what charter school CMOs like Kipp (targeted at underprivileged), Success Academy (targeted at NYC) and BASIS (targeted at students willing to work hard) are doing.
Many schools just take whatever teachers they can get, throw teachers into the classroom with no support, use whatever curriculum has the best sales team, and does little adjustment based on results or outcome.
The whole problem is that private schools only take the best students, which makes them more efficient on paper but in reality they just shifted the problem around.
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...
Oh, dear. You're reading this very wrong. The subject is not immigration and/or muslims, but about for-profit schools! That radical Islamists have been able to start their own school is just an example among others of this system's failings for crying out loud.
Muslims teaching the Quran and Arabic is hardly a problem that warrants calling them radical islamists and other charged words like them. The problem I'm trying to address is the partisan attitude of Expressen and their consequent dishonesty when it comes to issues related to muslims. It's just tiring to navigate through all the ideological and religious non-sense that these pieces of propaganda stem from, because they are not honest and they resort to these sorts of tactics. If they think their ideology and convictions are true, let them pave the way for discussion, surely they will annihilate Islam and Socialism ideologically in no time. But that's not what we see, it's the same old trash: terrorism, radical, islamist, and on and on it goes. Just throwing these words around in hopes the public feels threatened that the people Expressen dislikes so much are about to undermine the nation. Basically they would like to see a Crystal Nacht for muslims, they just don't know how to get there.
Not sure what you're on about really. But in this case the previous CEO of this particular school, Kunskapsskolan, was expelled from Sweden after a decision by the Swedish Security Service (SÄPO) after being deemed a threat against national security. What more does it take?
I didn't know about that. But it still doesn't warrant banning religious schools completely due to isolated incidents, and that was sort of the point I was making earlier. This is what the author was hinting at needs to be done, it's not an uncommon sentiment among the right either.
There are a few bad apples among every religious and non-religious group, it's just how it is. Doesn't mean one should attack an entire group, unless one is in a crusade or something. For every ISIS supporter I bet you one can find 10 pro-violence far-rightwingers. That doesn't mean one should lump the entirety of that side of the political spectrum and call them a danger to humanity/minorities. It's not fair to do so with the right, and it's not fair to do so with the muslims.
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.
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).
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.
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.