8.1 Education System in Sweden and its implication for USA
Compared its Scandinavian and European counterparts, Sweden falls behind its peers in education performance. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) ranks countries on student performance in mathematics, reading, and science, on the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA.
In terms of 2015 PISA scores, Sweden is behind Finland, Norway, and Denmark in almost all the categories. (N.B. Sweden actually has slightly higher score than Denmark in reading).
The PISA scores also show growing inequalities in the distribution of learning outcomes in Sweden. The performance gap between immigrant and non-immigrant students is big. Immigrant students in Sweden score 70 points lower in science than non-immigrant students (before accounting for students’ socio-economic profiles).
For a country that gives free education up including undergraduate education, the data show Sweden has some faults.
I travelled around Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö talking with teachers, students, and locals about education. Before coming to Sweden, I assume Sweden, as a social welfare state, had a near-perfect education system.
For a socialist state, Sweden has rather a very capitalistic education model.
In 1992, a major education reform allowed private (primary or secondary) schools to receive public funding. The public money (skolpeng) is distributed based on number of students enrolled. The students don’t necessarily pay for the school. Instead, each enrollment of student counts as a “voucher” which the school can use to redeem for funding from the local town. They are what you would call “charter schools” in the US.
This environment incentivizes for-profit education. Anyone can start an independent for-profit school or even a chain of schools. Like your neighborhood McDonalds, you get your neighborhood for-profit school in multiple parts in the city (i.e. Internationella Engelska Skolan).
Currently, about 20% of secondary school students attend private schools, and it’s growing. In fact, the idea is popular on the other side of the pond as well. The current appointee for Secretary of Education DeVos wants to pursue a voucher system and encourage a similar “for-profit education”. She claims all public schools would improve if faced with competition and parents had more choices.
On an interesting note, Ms. DeVos never went to a public school. You can read about her home state Michigan’s adoption of the voucher system and how it fared. Teachers’ unions believe voucher and charter system take funds away from public schools. Also, the idea of being “for-profit” in education sounds immoral. (South Korea is infamous for hakwons, or afterschool prep programs that most students attend every day until 11PM to account for the lack of equality among its school system, but that’s a story for another time.)
But I’m going to focus on Sweden. They have had a nationwide voucher system for more than two decades, and I think it can help us foresee the voucher system’s implications.
In the town of Gothenburg, private schools started to pop up here and there, enticing the local folks with various Latin words (veritas!), tech jargons, better education system, etc. And to really get their attention, they offered iPads (laptop, tablets, etc. you get the idea) and claimed this is the way of the 21st century education!
Boom. Sold. Who wouldn’t want an iPad? Many students soon transferred from public to private schools at no cost, and they got their iPads.
Soon, other students wanted to get iPads, and they soon afterwards transferred.
The public schools were faced with a dilemma. They were no longer getting enough skolpeng to be sustainable, and to compete with trendy private schools, they would have to invest in iPads to retain existing students and stave off private competition.
First, public schools closed because they simply couldn’t compete with the private schools.
Second, segregation and education inequality increases. Private schools promote having better teachers and resources. However, they have limited spots, so the spots would usually be given away based on grades.
Immigrant children have a significant academic disadvantage compared to the non-immigrant children. To list the basic reasons, they are not familiar with the Swedish language, history, and the ins-and-outs of the Swedish education system in relative to non-immigrants. Also, many of them were affected by violence and poverty; the children often have had gaps in their education during those time, and/or they have to deal with the trauma.
A combination of these disadvantages lead to lower academic performance. This means affluent or non-immigrant children are more likely to be offered a place of enrollment.
Third, for-profit schools, by nature, have a profit incentive to reduce quality. These companies have to attract enough students and have a decent profit margin for them to keep their operations running.
One way to attract and retain students is the grade inflation. They are at their disposable to come up with their own grading system. Much like sales at a clothing store, for-profit schools can offer generous grading policies or gem classes to make the students happy.
Also, students’ priorities don’t always mean economic priorities. The schools can reduce auxiliary school functions like the library, nursing, and counseling to increase surplus. I’ve visited a school where students literally receive most of education via computers in schools with intermittent interactions with a human teacher. This can lead to alarming gaps in students’ knowledge and their well-being.
In the case of Gothenburg, some private schools, after being successful, had administration issues and money-related scandals. Some schools either went down in quality, or they closed down. For many of the students, they had fewer number of schools to choose from, and it would lead to overcrowding at schools (mostly public), teacher and resource shortage, and decrease in quality.
Personally, charter schools have their merit. However, I haven’t heard a convincing argument for how it helps the general population as a whole. Among many political issues, education is something I have a very firm point of view: more funding, more respect for the teachers and students, and more education equality. I think most of the social/economic issues we see today can be solved if we just had better education.
I’ve been fortunate to have excellent teachers and classmates and receive education. But others should also have the same access to education. How much does my education really matter if I were to live in a country full of stupid people? How can we cooperate and work together if the arguments are based on incomplete knowledge and faulty logic?
