Nearly missed this article from the latest Economist on Swedish private schools, probably beceause it was in the business section. A bit of background: A 1994 law made it so that
pretty much anyone who satisfies basic standards to open a new school and take in children at the state's expense. The local municipality must pay the school what it would have spent educating each child itself-a sum of SKr48,000-70,000 ($8,000-12,000) a year, depending on the child's age and the school's location. Children must be admitted on a first-come, first-served basis--there must be no religious requirements or entrance exams. Nothing extra can be charged for, but making a profit is fine.
Since the law was passed, the proportion of school-age Swedes attending private schools has jumped from less than 1 percent to about 10 percent, spurred more by the growth of private school networks than by mom-and-pop operators. (USA Today comments today on a similar phenomenon with charter networks in the U.S.) The article compares the biggest such operator, Kunskapsskolan ("Knowledge Schools"), to IKEA:
Like IKEA, a giant Swedish furniture-maker, Kunskapsskolan gets its customers to do much of the work themselves. The vital tool, though, is not an Allen key but the Kunskapsporten ("Knowledge Portal"), a website containing the entire syllabus....Again like IKEA, no money is wasted on fancy surroundings. Kunskapsskolan Enskede, a school for 11- to 16-year-olds in a suburb of Stockholm, is a former office block into which classrooms, open-study spaces and two small lecture-theatres have been squeezed.
Also fascinating is the way the company manages its teachers:
Teachers update and add new material to the website during school holidays and get just seven weeks off each year, roughly the same as the average Swedish office worker....Performance monitoring is also important within the company: it tracks the performance of individual teachers to see which ones do best as personal tutors or as subject teachers. It offers bonuses to particularly successful teachers and is considering paying extra to good ones from successful schools who are willing to move to underperforming ones....
"We do not mind being compared to McDonald's," [company boss Per Ledin] says. "If we're religious about anything, it's standardisation. We tell our teachers it is more important to do things the same way than to do them well."
This last paragraph will no doubt throw many an American educator into a rage. In the United States, teachers are idealized as public servants and heroes (even if not all of them live up to that ideal). Casting them as assembly-line automatons would not go over well here. But it just might be a viable and effective education model for at least some proportion of American kids.
