If School Choice Can Work In Sweden - Road to the Middle Class

WHILE we Yanks and the Brits agonize over school choice last-ditch union leaders like Randi Weingarten hiss about people who don’t care about kids. But the socialist Swedes have gone ahead on school choice anyway. As Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth write:

Those denouncing the [school-voucher] system as the product of discredited right-wing ideology will have difficulty explaining its success in Sweden, arguably the most socialist country in the developed world. School vouchers were proposed in 1991 by its shortlived Conservative government, yet the scheme proved so popular that it has been preserved and expanded by the Social Democrats.

Sweden’s conservatives had no real plans on how to implement school choice. But it turned out that they didn’t need to. But they went ahead anyway.

To their astonishment, take-up was huge. They had unwittingly harnessed one of the strongest forces in civil society: parents’ determination to do what is best for their child.

And now, of course, every government school principal and every government teacher in Sweden knows that a dissatisfied parent can leave tomorrow. Just like a dissatisfied customer at Wal-Mart.

Freedom to set up a school is enshrined in the Dutch constitution [no kidding!], and today two in three state-funded schools are privately run. This bottom-up approach means more, smaller schools: the average school roll is 200 in Sweden and 190 in the Netherlands. In England it is 890 and rising: closures are running at the level of 120 schools a year.

Think of that. Lots of little schools all over the place. Mothers could walk their kids to the school on the corner, and if they didn’t like the nearest school they could go to another one. What a concept!

Come on America! What are we waiting for?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

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Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

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