Education in Sweden
The world standard for measuring educational achievement is the OECD’s PISA scores which reveal that Sweden does worse than world leaders like Finland, the Netherlands, and South Korea but better than the United States:
Nordic countries are often said to be highly homogeneous, which is true of Finland, but Sweden has more immigrants than the United States though of course much less poverty and inequality.
The most noteworthy aspect of Swedish education is a fairly robust school choice system. This is often described in the Anglophone press as involving “vouchers” in that any Swedish parent is entitled to take his or her children out of the state-run schools and put into another school, with the new school assigned the same level of per-pupil funding as a municipal school would have gotten. But these schools are more like what we call “charter schools”—they can’t have exclusive admissions policies and they can’t charge tuition above the value of the per pupil allotment.
The big difference is that many Swedish charters are run by for-profit firms. We’ve had some experiments with that in the U.S. and it hasn’t worked very well. Nobody’s really found a great way of making consistent profits running K-12 schools in America.
It’s not really clear to me, however, if Swedish schools are actually performing at a higher level than ours. If our child poverty level were where Sweden’s is, our kids’ test scores would be way higher. By contrast, in the Netherlands the child poverty rate is much higher than in Sweden—though of course much lower than in the United States—and the test scores are substantially better.
48 Responses to “Education in Sweden”
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October 3rd, 2009 at 9:51 am
Will increased funding, changes in policy, revised curriculum and other measures ultimately overcome widespread anti-intellectualism in our country? Both children and adults I encounter in my life deliver bemused curiosity or whithering mockery if anything beyond sports, celebrity gossip or the weather is brought up as a subject for discussion. If it’s exposed you know something of history, philosophy, literature, language, art or the sciences the general reaction is “Why do you bother filling your head with such worthless trivia and useless information?” Inner city kids are slammed for “acting white” if they excel in their studies. School boards attempt dictating the Earth is 6000 years old, man was zapped into existence exactly as you see him now and praying before class and sports events will result in a beneficial outcome, passing the test and beating your crosstown rival. Everyone “knows” doctors don’t know what they’re doing, lawyers and politicians are crooks, professors are working towards a Commie takeover of the nation and scientists exist solely to foist upon us falsehoods about how the world really works and what needs done to better respect the planet. The entire educated, intellectual class is to be mistrusted and not believed. This is the environment in which schools are supposed to educate young people. It’s not going to work.
October 3rd, 2009 at 10:02 am
I went to Swedish high school for a year. Trust me, it’s far better than in the US.
October 3rd, 2009 at 10:11 am
I’m sure that if our idiot-factory anti-intellectual conformist state-worshiping video game public schools were abolished immediately, someone would soon find a way to make a profit for K-12 schools.
October 3rd, 2009 at 10:27 am
You got to love how Matt Y pretends to care about child poverty without being willing to do anything that might actually fix it. According to him, taxing the wealthy is corrupt and stifles progress.
Limiting the supply of labor by reducing immigration in order to increases wages is evil racism.
Using tariffs or limiting free trade to keep jobs in America is unfair to the wealthy and will “hurt our economy”.
He doesn’t actually give a shit about this issue anymore than your average wingnut cares about healthcare. Sure, they may feel bad that some people have to suffer. Do not, however, ask them to do anything about it.
October 3rd, 2009 at 10:27 am
Why is there any child poverty in northern/western Europe? I thought they were explicitly constructed as welfare states. I knew there was banlieu-type alienation, but in all honesty the non-trivial indices of child poverty are a surprise to me.
October 3rd, 2009 at 10:29 am
You’re probably correct, Bob. WalMart can step up to the plate and rescue the education system. If they can perform with ruthless efficiency an immensely profitable retail model why not use that template for schools? All the teachers and administrators can wear a blue vest, work part time without benefits, be barred from attempting collective bargaining or organizing and earn money on the side filming public service announcements extolling the virtues of a WalMart based education. Competition for alternate learning venues will of course be scant as WalMart will benefit from legislation enabling them to “crush” the competition. Kinda like they do with local merchants on Main Street, USA. This would get to the crux of the problem, wouldn’t it? Teachers have too many benefits, get paid too much, don’t fear for their job security sufficiently, look to lobby as a group for more favorable treatment and secretly resent the customer (students). WalMArt can fix all that. When you graduate you can just walk from the classroom (conveniently located behind your local WalMart store) straight into the store aisles stocking shelves. Brilliant!!
October 3rd, 2009 at 10:30 am
Bob, only by excluding 60% of the population and charging the remaining and charging the remaining 40% an arm and a leg to attend a school. Basically, it would be our college system expanded downward. The children of the the upper class would be taken care of, but nobody else’s would be.
If you actually tried to do that, I’d be the first in line to swing you from a tree.
October 3rd, 2009 at 10:33 am
While the Pisa study is interesting and has lots of empirical data that support “left” aproaches to education, it is still a huge exageration to consider Pisa some gold standard. Neither does Pisa measure everything nor does it measure how things go when thos students get older. One way obviously to get good Pisa scores is to throw all money and pressure to achieve now on people the Pisa test age.
Immigrant statistics alone are a bit misleading. I know for example that in Germany the eastern Euroepan immigrants do much better in school than the Turkish ones. The explanation is simple. The eastern Europeans already have parents with a rather good education, while the Turkish immigrants usually have parents that are uneducated even by Turkish standars.
October 3rd, 2009 at 10:47 am
Bob wins today’s Adventures in Self-Parody award.
October 3rd, 2009 at 10:57 am
Our school system is like our health care – hideously inefficient and costly. But as the former benefits big pharma, insurance companies, tort lawyers, doctors, etc., the latter benefits teachers and the bloated administrative hierarchy. Students and patients can go fuck themselves. It’s the American way.
October 3rd, 2009 at 11:30 am
I’m curious how the thing that schools need is the board taking 10% of the budget out of the system every year as ‘profit.’
October 3rd, 2009 at 11:36 am
kafka Says:
October 3rd, 2009 at 10:57 am
“the latter benefits teachers and the bloated administrative hierarchy”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So true. I drove past the local elementary school in my neighborhood yesterday. The teacher/administrator parking lot was full of Mercedes, BMW, Porsche and Audi luxury/sport vehicles. Most of the teachers there spend their summers in Monte Carlo, while back stateside their mansions get the annual pool cleaning and landscape refurbishing performed by the local servant class. Of course once they hit age 45 none of this is of any concern as they retire on the taxpayer dime to beachside condos in Costa Rica and Italy.
October 3rd, 2009 at 12:01 pm
This is the third time that Matt has posted this child poverty rate graph and the third time that I’ve explained that it’s a meaningless graph. It doesn’t display the number of children below an absolute standard of living – it’s the number of children below a certain percentage of the median income of the country under consideration (I looked it up before but I’m not going to bother to this time.) So it’s a graph of income inequality, not a graph of poverty at all. You can’t conclude from this graph that the percentage of children below some minimum level of decent life is greater in US than in, say, Hungary.
Matt seems not to care. As he seems never to read his comments, perhaps he genuinely doesn’t know.
October 3rd, 2009 at 12:03 pm
A lot of school systems do have a bloated administrative hierarchy. It’s where teachers go when they want to stay in the system but can’t stand teaching anymore.
Also, MattY, at some point you should evaluate the state of Sweden’s university system.
Specifically when it comes to the sciences, Sweden seems to lag behind compared to the UK, Germany, France, and Switzerland. Why is that?
October 3rd, 2009 at 12:04 pm
This is the third time that Matt has posted this child poverty rate graph and the third time that I’ve explained that it’s a meaningless graph. It doesn’t display the number of children below an absolute standard of living – it’s the number of children below a certain percentage of the median income of the country under consideration (I looked it up before but I’m not going to bother to this time.) So it’s a graph of income inequality, not a graph of poverty at all. You can’t conclude from this graph that the percentage of children below some minimum level of decent life is greater in US than in, say, Hungary.
Matt seems not to care. As he seems never to read his comments, perhaps he genuinely doesn’t know.
Oh, and Rich in PA – the way this phony “child poverty” statistic is defined, only a country with a level of income inequality so low that no country in world actually qualifies would have no child poverty.
October 3rd, 2009 at 12:10 pm
The first comment, by Steve Duncan, says it all. No other comment addresses it. Remember the 2000 election? The Republicans said that we should not vote for that egghead Gore, but rather for a “guy you could have a beer with.” And Bush won. Remember Spiro Agnew’s campaign against thinkers? Remeber “the silent majority?” They have been exploiting anti-intellectualism since at least 1968, and with great success.
The problem is much deeper and more widespread than we admit.
October 3rd, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Probably because poverty is measured by yearly income, rather than something more sensible like consumption. People can have lots of financial wealth and/or human capital and still be measured as “poor” based on income. For example, if you had half a million dollars in the bank and you quit your job as a consultant to go to start your own business or go to law school, your kids might be counted as poor in a survey for that year. I personally know lots of Ph.D. students who are eligible for medicaid.
October 3rd, 2009 at 12:35 pm
“Sweden has more immigrants than the United States”
This would only be true if you added “per capita.”
At least it’s not blatantly wrong, like your previous statement that “Sweden has one of the largest immigrant populations in the world—more than in the United States.”
Where did I get this information? The chart you posted. The numbers on the Y axis are percentage of the total population. So while Sweden has about a third more immigrants per capita, it has one thirty-third of the total population of the United States, and hence about 4% as many immigrants.
October 3rd, 2009 at 12:42 pm
Old Guy, and Gore would have been more fun to have beer with.
Steve, the school with all the expensive cars in the parking lot is not an inner city problem school? The statistics don’t separate wealthy school districts, at least I don’t think so.
Bloix, the question is also, what is a decent live? I think if we look at our standard of poverty the poor are much more poor here. Are there homeless families with children in any EU state? I don’t know of any, I may be wrong.
October 3rd, 2009 at 12:49 pm
People become sick and unhappy from relative poverty compared to their environment. So the relative income statistics considering poverty do make sense for the issues at debate here.
October 3rd, 2009 at 1:04 pm
urgs,relative poverty surely is part of it, and as you said above, education of the parents plays a big role in education. But homeless and hungry children is real poverty, how does that affect the educational statistics? I would not want to split hair who is second or third but the bottom and the top is a real difference.
October 3rd, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Iggy Pop’s Brother Steve Pop Says:
October 3rd, 2009 at 12:35 pm
“Sweden has more immigrants than the United States”
This would only be true if you added “per capita.”
At least it’s not blatantly wrong, like your previous statement that “Sweden has one of the largest immigrant populations in the world—more than in the United States.”
Where did I get this information? The chart you posted. The numbers on the Y axis are percentage of the total population. So while Sweden has about a third more immigrants per capita, it has one thirty-third of the total population of the United States, and hence about 4% as many immigrants.
Cripes. Really? You really needed to post this? You think everyone reading this post, besides you, doesn’t know exactly what MY meant?
October 3rd, 2009 at 1:51 pm
Re: Are there homeless families with children in any EU state?
Depends on what you mean by homeless. I’m sure you could find families that do not have an abode of their own but are living with a friend or relative for financial reasons. If you mean literally “living in the streets” then that is rare for families even in the US where homeless families are usually stuck in welfare motels and actual street-dwellers are mainly single people (including a lot of runaway teens). Among populations that are deliberately “off the grid” like the Roma you can probably find some families who are very literally homeless though.
October 3rd, 2009 at 2:03 pm
You think everyone reading this post, besides you, doesn’t know exactly what MY meant?
No, which would be why I didn’t say that, and addressed my comment to MY in the second person.
I’m so, so sorry I upset you. I’ll never do it again. Using sloppily written statements that say something untrue, and opposite to what you meant them to say, is, of course, one of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Writers. lfv has spoken! So mote it be!
(clap of thunder)
October 3rd, 2009 at 2:14 pm
wow, look at canada up there! the most diverse western country and it’s chugging along there in the top 5. go canada!
October 3rd, 2009 at 2:14 pm
Bob Roddis Says:
October 3rd, 2009 at 10:11 am
I’m sure that if our idiot-factory anti-intellectual conformist state-worshiping video game public schools were abolished immediately, someone would soon find a way to make a profit for K-12 schools.
They could teach the secrets of GOOOLLLDDDD! Vocational schools could specify in tin-foil hat making. GOOOLLLDDDD.
October 3rd, 2009 at 2:15 pm
“Specify”, above, should be “specialize”. Clearly I went to a government-run school.
October 3rd, 2009 at 2:18 pm
With the government-run schools gone, Bob would be free to earn GOLD! to stuff in his mattress through pamplet correspondence courses in economics.
October 3rd, 2009 at 2:29 pm
So how much cash does Sweden spend per pupil?
October 3rd, 2009 at 2:31 pm
What Steve Duncan said @ 1. How is American culture demonstrably and objectively more anti-intellectual than other cultures? Many kids growing up today have no exposure to the arts except through junk pop culture and media marketing brainwashing.
Also, six of the eight worst countries educate in English.
English being the lingua franca internationally, these same six don’t have robust, universal second and third language programs.
Anything there? Does the English language per se corrode the brain? The arrogance of mono-lingualism? Real brain development benefits to multi-language study?
October 3rd, 2009 at 2:41 pm
How is American culture demonstrably and objectively more anti-intellectual than other cultures?
You’re joking, right? You think there are public schools in any other developed country that are controlled by people who believe that Darwin was wrong and that the earth is 5000 years old?
October 3rd, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Just a thought, I can’t imagine any radio or tv station anywhere in Europe, allowing a Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, and all the other nuts we have, on the air. We had a time when Public Broadcasting did a lot more than it does now. The air waves could be used for more than just making money for corporations. We are ready to sell everything as long as we can make a $.
October 3rd, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Poland has a religious nuts radio station. Radio Maria or something like that.
October 3rd, 2009 at 4:02 pm
@ 31: Well, sort of. It’s American education that’s really joking. Let’s hear it for local control, abstinence only sex education, intelligent design. Holocaust denial, anyone? Actually I was thinking along different lines, hoping for some help in quantifying the stoopid.
How much is our miserable educational performance due to inchoate, magical religious thinking. How much to our vacuous popular culture? Polarization of wealth and income? Etc.
Seems to me the stoopid goes way beyond school boards, as in: “Keep the gov’t out of my health care, but don’t touch my Medicare.” Not to mention talk radio. Blows the mind.
October 3rd, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Re: You think there are public schools in any other developed country that are controlled by people who believe that Darwin was wrong and that the earth is 5000 years old?
There is no push for Young Earth Creationism in public schools. None. The current anti-evolution movement is Intelligent Design, which I will agree is a lot of half-baked hokum, but it does not quarrel with the age of the Earth. It takes astronomy, geology etc. at face value and focuses very narrowly on the issue of life’s origins.
Re: Does the English language per se corrode the brain? The arrogance of mono-lingualism?
I suspect that multi-lingualism is indeed beneficial to intellectual development– but mainly when it is acquired naturally not through forced learning in one’s teens. In this respect the English-speaking countries suffer simply by their size and isolation. You can travel days across the US, Canada or Australia and not enter a non-English speaking region (Quebec and the Spanish speaking enclaves in the US really don’t count; they are generally bilingual in English). New Zealand is an island in the middle of no where. Even England and Ireland are a bit insular vis-a-vis Europe.
October 3rd, 2009 at 6:05 pm
JonF – the reason there is no push for young earth creationism is that the Supreme Court has held that you can’t teach it because it’s a religious belief. Intelligent design is a 2nd best strategy. And see this article that reports a survey showing that one in six public school biology teachers believes that the earth is less than 6000 years old.
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jan/036
October 3rd, 2009 at 6:26 pm
Once again, the Korean education system is terrible, and any metric that puts Korea at the top is broken. Does Matt want to see American parents taking out loans and loading up on credit card debt to pay for private cram schools? More importantly, does Matt want to see children studying 16-20 hours everyday?
October 3rd, 2009 at 6:37 pm
I was going to add that you could ask any half-way competent teacher who has taught in Korea, or you could ask Koreans themselves about their education system (I bet over 95% would say it’s terrible).
But Matt doesn’t believe in face to face conversations.
October 3rd, 2009 at 6:48 pm
Is child poverty in other countries understated as it is in the US?
October 3rd, 2009 at 6:49 pm
@David Penner 38
But Matt doesn’t believe in face to face conversations.
STFU.
October 3rd, 2009 at 7:25 pm
Wow, I didn’t realize Canada’s education (at least in math and sciences) was that good! Nice to know.
I doubt kids in Canada are extremely different from kids in America, so the “kids aren’t willing to work and learn” explanation isn’t very convincing.
An interesting thing about the education system in British Columbia is that the government does partially fund private schools, including religious ones, and nobody considers it a big deal despite the province being, on the whole, very secular. And it works fine. The one I went to had less electives than public schools, but better teachers (and nicer students).
October 3rd, 2009 at 9:04 pm
You wont see the negative effects of religious schools on the Pisa test….( real nuts religous schools that teach creationism and the like excluded).
October 4th, 2009 at 12:17 am
David Penner,
PISA is measuring outcomes, not methods. I teach in Taiwan, so, yea, I know the pressures on the kids to succeed. OTOH, it doesn’t seem to do them much harm, though it certainly hits parents- ask me about the bills for my kids’ math cram school.
For instance, last night I taught a class of 16-year-olds who were spending 6:30-9:30 on Saturday night learning English, and they all seemed perfectly happy and healthy- in a lot better condition than I usually was on Saturday night at their age, anyway.
October 4th, 2009 at 7:05 am
“By contrast, in the Netherlands the child poverty rate is much higher than in Sweden—though of course much lower than in the United States—and the test scores are substantially better.”
And the Dutch system is also a voucher system…..
October 4th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Also, six of the eight worst countries educate in English.
English being the lingua franca internationally, these same six don’t have robust, universal second and third language programs.
Anything there? Does the English language per se corrode the brain? The arrogance of mono-lingualism? Real brain development benefits to multi-language study?
Socialism didn’t really take off in the rich white formerly British countries like it did in Continental Europe.
Said recently-settled countries (US, Can, Aus, NZ) had tons of land to serve as an escape valve.
Anglo-Saxon culture is simply less communitarian than Continental culture.
From what I hear from Australians or people who have worked in Australia, the culture there is somewhat anti-intellctual, too.
October 4th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Katherine @41: An interesting thing about the education system in British Columbia is that the government does partially fund private schools, including religious ones, and nobody considers it a big deal despite the province being, on the whole, very secular. And it works fine. The one I went to had less electives than public schools, but better teachers (and nicer students).
One thing that anti-secularists often get wrong is the conflation of secularism with anti-religiosity or atheism. Secularists, too, get this confused and feel reflexively uncomfortable with publicly sanctioned religiosity. In a lot of America, the secularists feel under threat by the publicly religious whom they misidentify as theocrats and the publicly religious feel under threat by the secularists who they misidentify as militant atheists. Of course, in America, there *are* lots of theocrats who try to get evolution out of public education and things like that, so secularists are sometimes right to feel threatened. I suspect in Canada, people just are more relaxed about this and don’t feel the need to impose themselves on others.
America just has a cultural disadvantage that makes it harder to implement what, if Katherine’s observations are generally true in BC, would be a more successful system. How much political effort should a partisan spend in trying to change the culture and how much should he or she spend in trying to adapt to the culture?
October 4th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
[...] in Daily life, Education at 11:43 am by LeisureGuy Fascinating post (with charts) by Matthew Yglesias, comparing educational achievement (and poverty rates) among nations, including the [...]
October 5th, 2009 at 9:42 am
Social heterogeneity also doesn’t prevent Canada and Australia, the two countries with the highest percentages of immigrants relative to their total populations, from consistently scoring higher than the United States.