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
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.
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).
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...
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.
Both these are bad in different ways.
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.
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.
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.
"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.)
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.
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"...
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.