If You Can't Make School Vouchers Work in Sweden, You Can't Make it Work Anywhere

It turns out that Milton Friedman education reform, much like all of his real word ideas, has turned out to be a huge clusterf%$#:

Every three years, Americans wring their hands over the state of our schools compared with those in other countries. The occasion is the triennial release of global scholastic achievement rankings based on exams administered by the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which tests students in 65 countries in math, science, and languages. Across all subjects, America ranked squarely in the middle of the pack when the tests were first given in 2000, and its position hardly budged over the next dozen years.

The angst over U.S. student performance—and its implications for the American workforce of the near future—is inevitably accompanied by calls for education reform: greater accountability, more innovation. Just as inevitable are the suggestions for how more accountability and innovation could be realized: more charter schools, more choice, less bureaucratic oversight.

Advocates for choice-based solutions should take a look at what’s happened to schools in Sweden, where parents and educators would be thrilled to trade their country’s steep drop in PISA scores over the past 10 years for America’s middling but consistent results. What’s caused the recent crisis in Swedish education? Researchers and policy analysts are increasingly pointing the finger at many of the choice-oriented reforms that are being championed as the way forward for American schools. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that adding more accountability and discipline to American schools would be a bad thing, it does hint at the many headaches that can come from trying to do so by aggressively introducing marketlike competition to education.

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But Swedish school reforms did incorporate the essential features of the voucher system advocated by Friedman. The hope was that schools would have clear financial incentives to provide a better education and could be more responsive to customer (i.e., parental) needs and wants when freed from the burden imposed by a centralized bureaucracy. And the Swedish market for education was open to all, meaning any entrepreneur, whether motivated by religious beliefs, social concern, or the almighty dollar, could launch a school as long as he could maintain its accreditation and attract “paying” customers.

For a while, at least if media accounts of the reforms are any indication, things looked like they were going pretty well. Voucher school students consistently outperformed their counterparts at government schools; in 2008, the London Telegraph described the reforms’ impact as “tremendous.” The number of private schools increased tenfold in less than a decade, with a majority run as for-profits.

But in the wake of the country’s nose dive in the PISA rankings, there’s widespread recognition that something’s wrong with Swedish schooling. As part of ongoing efforts to determine the root cause, the Swedish Schools Inspectorate (the equivalent of the U.S. federal government’s Department of Education) called for a regrading of a subset of standardized tests administered during 2010 and 2011. In total, nearly 50,000 students at all grade levels from more than 700 schools had their tests in English, Swedish, science, and math re-evaluated.

BTW, Friedman's ideas were implemented for about a year at the beginning of the brutally totalitarian rule of Augusto Pinochet with the assistance of his acolytes, the "Chicago Boys".

After less than a decade, these "reforms" collapsed under the pressure of incompetence and corruption:

After the coup and the death of Allende, Pinochet and his Chicago Boys did their best to dismantle Chile's public sphere, auctioning off state enterprises and slashing financial and trade regulations. Enormous wealth was created in this period but at a terrible cost: by the early 80s, Pinochet's Friedman-prescribed policies had caused rapid de-industrialisation, a tenfold increase in unemployment and an explosion of distinctly unstable shantytowns. They also led to a crisis of corruption and debt so severe that, in 1982, Pinochet was forced to fire his key Chicago Boy advisers and nationalise several of the large deregulated financial institutions. (Sound familiar?)

If you hear Milton Friedman's name invoked in support of an idea, be very, very afraid.<sup>*

*</sup>Full disclosure, I do agree with Milton Friedman that Marijuana should be legalized.^†
†More full disclosure: I know Milton Friedman's son, David Friedman, though our discussions have entirely dealt with medieval history.