Swedish meatballs

Sweden’s newest craze since lingonberries and IKEA? It’s ownership-society education ( did Milton Friedman visit Stockholm before he passed?) Swedish for-profit schools, supported by taxpayer funds are drawing rave reviews from conservatives and McCain types.

This from Edweek:

Andrew Coulson, an education expert at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C., called the Swedish program "a beacon, being more market-like than any other among rich countries."

What’s the big deal, you ask? Don’t private schools exist everywhere? Don’t we have our own run of privately-managed charter schools? Yes, but here in the U.S., the number of children attending private schools is on the decline while in Sweden, where public schools follow a set national curriculum, they have increased to about 10%.

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"...it is more important to do things the same way than to do them well.”

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There’s even a chain of for-profit schools modeled on IKEA (I’m not making this up).

The Economist gives them lots of play this week. They’re called, Kunskapsskolan (“Knowledge Schools”) and they opened their first six schools in 2000. Four more opened last autumn, bringing the total to 30. They now have 700 employees and teache nearly 10,000 pupils, with a big operating profit that’s increased by making teachers work longer hours with no prep or planning time. Look out KIPP!

Here’s my favorite quote in the Economist story. It’s from company boss, Per Ledin.

Many schools would be horrified to be likened to IKEA, but Mr Ledin goes one better. “We do not mind being compared to McDonald's,” he says. “If we're religious about anything, it's standardization. We tell our teachers it is more important to do things the same way than to do them well.” He then broadens the analogy to hotels and airlines, which make money only if they are popular enough to maintain high occupancy rates.