Turning Citizens Into Consumers: The Disappearing Democratic Dream and Establishment of School Markets in Sweden

• In Event: Global Education Reform: How Privatization Versus Public Investment Influences Education Outcomes

Abstract

Sweden changed rapidly during the social democratic era after the Second World War. Its welfare state and educational system gained a prominent democratic reputation and Swedish pupils performed well on the international precursors to PISA. However, Sweden has changed and currently has the most rapid growth of inequality across the OECD, while the Swedish educational system has transformed into a market model, and its PISA scores have plummeted to an all time low. This paper examines the policies and practices that created this educational shift in delivery and decline in performance in the Swedish case.
This case study compares the historical aspects of the welfare state from the period of 1945-1980 with characteristics of the contemporary school system. The study uses Stephen Ball’s distinction between levels of discourse as a model for understanding the transformation of the school system into a market-based model. Governmental reports, proposals, and records from parliamentary debates provide the historical context. The transformation is then documented using national statistics; reports from school authorities; legislation and ordinances; and official application requirements and procedures for private schools.
The Swedish case shows the contours and extent of a rapid and profound change into a decentralized and market based educational system. In particular, document analysis reveals how the rationale from the postwar decades for private schools evolves from influence to replacement. The rationale changes from the government stressing the importance of allowing and/or preserving private alternatives in the regular school system as means to positively influence municipality schools to a process of scaling up in which current private schools can and should replace such public municipality schools.

Analysis of the different historical concepts of private education in Swedish school system shows how a matching shift in contemporary discourses come as private schools become concepts of “independent schools” and “free schools,” rather than using terminology that places “private” in the forefront. The study connects these changes in recent decades of educational transformation to a wider and longer national history of how the overarching ideas of schooling as part of democratizing society become overshadowed by ideas freedom of school choice. It provides insights into the interplay between international reform trends and national historical heritage and how ideological as well as administrative anchored national policy and practice of decentralization, deregulation and privatization interacts and layered upon each other to an extent that it creates a profoundly changed situation for education.

Finally, the study contributes to descriptions of how exogenous processes (national and sectorial) not only layers upon endogenous processes (in a national educational system) but also interact and reactivate endogenous remains into preconditions for national and local transformation of educational systems. In sum, the analysis shows that, in Sweden, the once clearly articulated societal ambition to extend democracy via education has become reshaped into an individually oriented democratic right to choose a site for education.

Author

• Bjorn Astrand, Karlstad University