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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 We then had to suffer years of anti-scientific school regulations where student feelings and choice superseded traditional curriculum.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.

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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.

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.

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

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

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?

1) https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-ci...

2) https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/elementary-school-princip...

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.

Both these are bad in different ways.

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 principal-agent problem goes deep.

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.)

https://tankesmedjanbalans.se/

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)

See ‘cost_of_marketing’.

If the marketing is misleading, couldn't students just go back to their old schools?

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.

This assumes all the variables are the same between the same examples. Which they would not be.

Your equation misses an 'efficiency' parameter.

Ah, yes, the fabled “efficiency” of private companies. Where would you have me put it? On teachers salaries? On building costs?

On teacher selection.

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.

As is yours here.

Proving logical fallacy in the article?

Please do enlighten me about my agenda, this will be very interesting to say the least.

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