In DN on 18 June, C-leader Annie Lööf and the party’s education policy spokesperson Fredrik Christensson wrote a post in the debate about the Swedish school, one of the hot questions before the election campaign that it is necessary to formulate a new school policy. Hopefully, the Center Party is also ready to think new.
The debate article expresses views that seem more focused on minor adjustments to current policies than radical changes. Nevertheless, it is becoming increasingly clear that current policy is based on a system error that needs something other than a patch and correction of various shortcomings.
An important issue should be to counteract school companies’ opportunities to withdraw profits. The current system is based on the idea that financial incentives promote higher quality education. Experience from recent decades has clearly shown that this is not the case. Rather, education has deteriorated in various ways.
Profit can in principle achieved in two different ways, partly by keeping costs down, partly by increasing revenues. Market thinking is often an effective way to achieve cost control and quality improvements to improve companies’ opportunities to develop and survive. But when it comes to school, it has had opposite effects.
Lower costs in the school area can be achieved by employing a larger proportion of unqualified teachers (with lower salaries), increasing class sizes, reducing the purchase of teaching materials, reducing the number of important functions for the school such as school libraries, laboratory halls and gymnasiums – factors that are important conditions for achieve good quality in teaching.
The income can be increased by increasing the number of students and thus the tuition fees that come with it. It is tempting to attract with higher grades as an effective means of competition, but which all too often is not in relation to the students’ actual knowledge. These forces are built into the current system and we will not escape it with minor adjustments in the principles for correcting samples.
Overall, this leads to the gradual erosion of the quality of education. It is strange that Swedish business and industry and several political parties accept and even promote this development when at the same time there is constant talk of the lack of a competent workforce to employ.
It is good that there are different schools to choose from and that students and parents have the opportunity to make such choices. It is possible to have such a system without the schools being run for profit.
Lööf and Christensson propose that up to 50 percent of the places be distributed according to queue time and that guardians should be allowed to put children in line no earlier than two years before school starts. The question arises as to how the Center Party justifies this adjustment. Why is the party not prepared to promote a system where all applications are made at one and the same time at a certain time? It would mean equal conditions for all, become more fair and efficient.