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| Profits and People Go Together |
School Choice in Sweden: Who Knew?
by Christopher Chantrill
February 12, 2007 at 4:06 am
FOR THE last ten years in Sweden there is only one thing you can say about school choice. It’s the law.
It must be the best-kept secret in education. In other words, I never knew about it. Not until I read about it last week in an article in the London Spectator (reg) that called for liberating schools in Britain.
Naturally, I blogged the article immediately. But where could I get more information?
Google aside, where would you look? I know where I would look. I would look at the Milton & Rose D. Friedman Foundation website.
What a surprise! The Friedman Foundation has a white paper on the Swedish school-choice reforms, authored by Frederick Bergström and J. Michael Sandström (pdf here).
Here are the basic features of the Swedish reform:
- Independent schools and municipal schools are placed on an equal footing for funding.
- Any group can apply to open an independent school: non-profit, for-profit, religious.
- To get permission to open a new independent school you make an application to the National Agency of Education. Few applications are turned down. It is difficult for the local municipality to sustain an objection to a new school.
- No fees may be charged.
- The number of independent schools has quadrupled since 1992/93. The market share of independent schools is now about 10 percent.
- Competition has improved the municipal schools.
- Teachers are happier in the independent schools.
Teachers are happier in the independent schools. That could be a very big deal. As Bersgström and Sandström write:
It should also be clear that teachers have no reason to fear school vouchers. To the contrary, when the choice of employer is not only between different municipalities but also between several independent schools, this seems to benefit teachers. Also, the working conditions in the independent schools appear to be superior to those in the municipal schools. This may be due to a less bureaucratic structure of the former.
School-choice advocates should pay close attention to this. We don’t know what is important to US teachers, but the chances are that they would appreciate improvement in working conditions—in the way they are treated—over more material things like money.
Right now teachers are being led by their unions to oppose school reform to the death.
But sooner or later teachers are going to find out from their friends that they might like teaching in an independent school.
Then we will start to see the wall of defiance start to break down.
And then, perhaps, parents in the United States will win the freedom to send their children to the school of their choice.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
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