Sweden is not the US, it's quite different.
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.
- The schools get a fixed amount of money per student.
- The single largest predictor of school success is education level of the parents.
- most for profit schools are in areas with higher education.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".