Read this fascinating article in Slate by Ray Fisman, an economist at the Columbia Business School.
In the early 1990s, the Swedish government fell for Milton Friedman’s ideas about school choice. More students in Sweden go to privately-run and for-profit schools than any other developed nation in the world. “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 time, things looked promising. But no more.
“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.”
He concludes, quoting a charter founder:
“Maybe the overall message is, as Norman Atkins of Relay GSE put it to me, “there are no panaceas” in public education. We tend to look for the silver bullet—whether it’s the glories of the market or the techno-utopian aspirations of education technology—when in fact improving educational outcomes is a hard, messy, complicated process. It’s a lesson that Swedish parents and students have learned all too well: Simply opening the floodgates to more education entrepreneurs doesn’t disrupt education. It’s just plain disruptive.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There’s another part to this that Democrats and liberals should pay attention to. Democrats and liberals don’t run on privatizing public schools.
If the result of ed reform is privatization, no voter who supported these folks will care what the INTENTION was.
The Greens supported public school privatization in Sweden with good intentions. They have now apologized for destroying that system. Eventually, facts on the ground trump good intentions. If public schools disappear, BOTH Parties in the US will be held to account for that, NO MATTER if their intentions were good.
Democrats didn’t run on it. That’s deceptive.
Chiara, Republicans have promoted privatization since at least the 1950s. Charters became the lure that tricked the Democrats into supporting privatization. Not only do they destroy a vital part of the public sector, they adopt the GOP agenda.
Both parties being held to account means neither party is held to account. It’s why terrible bipartisan behavior lasts forever (war on drugs, privatization of everything under the sun).
I ran across this response to Fishman’s article: http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/383304/sweden-has-education-crisis-it-wasnt-caused-school-choice-tino-sanandaji
I found the most interesting points to be that the 1/3 of municipalities that had no private schools at all and still showed a significant decline in PISA scores and that there is a national and that pedagogy is controlled centrally at the national and those rules apply to all schools, public or private. Surely that latter point is one that the readers here would think significant.
It’s the same fundamental error that ed reformers keep making, though.
They pretend ed reform happens in isolation, that “choice” schools somehow don’t effect existing public schools.
Public education is a system, and it doesn’t matter if you blow it up and fragment it and call it something else.
It operates as a system, and each piece moves the system as a whole.
Why would anyone ever assume there would be no downside? They can’t radically re-figure without downside risk. What is the downside risk of a “choice” system? Existing public schools. Ignoring that won’t make it go away. That’s the risk.
Saying you want to improve public schools and then harming a whole bunch of them in the process is not acceptable. At the very least ADMIT the potential harm to voters. They’re finding out anyway.
Chiara,
It seems to me that if a significantly large group of municipalities have no private schools and they still saw a decline in test scores, perhaps the private schools did not cause the decline in test scores.
This NR article argues that it’s not vouchers that are the problem, but rather choice. It’s a slippery argument that doesn’t ultimately refute the overall point that choice, per se, is a disruption, a likely harmful one, and pretty obviously not a helpful one.
My take is that the article argues that there are multiple changes that might account for the decline in scores, but the author seems to be leaning towards changes in the nationally mandated pedagogy required of all schools.
TE – thanks for posting this link. It is an interesting take on the problem. What I noticed, in addition to the rigid curriculum and teaching methods, he mentions other unanticipated problems: grade inflation, poor student discipline and a decline in status ( and pay) for teachers. Does any of this sound familiar?
Dr. Ravitch could hardly point to a sloppier and more inaccurate article: http://educationnext.org/sweden-school-choice/
Nice try. Go ahead and check out who the author is, and what credentials he has. Your unspoken nod to his word ‘inaccurate,’ clear indication of your blind faith in pro-free market advocate. Of course there should be some disagreements in statistics, but that doesn’t negate the country’s trend toward privatization and PISA scores.
I think the interesting point is that 1/3 of Swedish municipalities have no private schools at all, yet showed a similar decline. The author of my link argues that changes in the nationally mandated pedagogy for all schools, public or private, was the likely cause of changes in student scores.
So sounds like, from teaching economist’s post below that he/she and WT are the same person with alternate id’s?
Kate,
I only post under this name.
WT,
It only goes to show how easily education “data” can be cherry-picked by anyone on any side. The debate will be endless. Both articles, Slate’s and Coulson’s, are filled with conveniently chosen items for analysis.
You can advocate for school choice. Just realize that over time it will not lead to schools of excellence. It will lead to an increasing stratification of good, mediocre and bad schools. And those schools will be increasingly selective in their admissions. K-12 will simply be like the college application model. It will be very Brave New World, with the Alphas, Betas, Gammas, …
WT, that article in educationnext.org was authored by Andrew J. Coulson who directs the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. Wow, the Cato Institute. Isn’t that an echo chamber for the Koch brothers and other right wing nut jobs?
Joe,
I think the more important question is if the arguments presented are correct. What do you think?
How about a similar article written by Dr. Henry Levin of Teachers College, Columbia University, who reaches the same conclusion that vouchers in Sweden have been unsuccessful: https://dianeravitch.net/2013/03/26/the-swedish-voucher-system-an-appraisal/
Sneer at the author all you like (it’s common around here for people who can’t refute the facts to complain that they don’t like the person who is stating the facts). The fact remains that Fisman claimed that “more Swedish students go to privately run (and mostly for-profit) schools than in any other developed country on earth.” Yet this was an outright lie. Belgium, Netherlands, Korea, Ireland, and UK all have far higher percentages. And the majority of Swedish private schools are non-profit.
Game, set, match. If someone lies about such easily checked facts, why link to his article?
Where is your proof of YOUR assertions? Link a good article here, please.
Threatened,
The table on page 4 of this OECD publication shows the percentage of students attending both private government dependent a private independent schools: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisainfocus/48482894.pdf
On that table, admittedly slightly dated (2011 publication date), Sweden is below the OECD average for the percentage of students attending private school.
The author of Slate article made correction. Point taken. But it doesn’t say other countries who are alleged to have more privately funded schools than Swenden are for-profit, either. Oh wait, it doesn’t really matter because it toally depends on who fund schools, right!? They’re not gonna make any progress if choice program and management are done in a similar manner with many charters in the US(low qualifications, ignoring public accountability)?
The author of Slate article made correction. Point taken. But it doesn’t say other countries who are alleged to have more privately funded schools than Swenden are for-profit, either. Oh wait, it doesn’t really matter because it toally depends on who fund schools, and how cozy they are with the central or the state government regarding the motives for business opportunity, right!? They’re not gonna make any progress if choice program and management are done in a similar manner with many charters in the US(low qualifications, ignoring public accountability).
I was lost at quoting someone from Relay GSE. Is that the fake, fast track to a masters degree program for TFA and charter school clerk/teachers? Let me anoint you with a degree and certificate.
Yes, Donna. They recently opened a campus in Newark.
Notice that the drop in PISA scores seems to be invoked as if those scores are sufficient evidence that schools failed, and privatization was the cause.
The form of the argument is all too familiar, all too easy.
Why not expose the fraud in Milton Friedman’s theory of “consumer choice” as the source of all educational excellence and all great things in the world?
Did Sweden privatize their health system for more choice? Did it privatize the university system for more choice and innovation against the status quo? Did Sweden dump all its great social programs in the name of free market alternatives? One must pay attention to any of the right wing drivel that is vomited up by the National Review.
Joe,
When you talk about “privatize the university system”, as far as I can tell, post secondary education in the US have always been privatized in the way the term is usually used here (run independently, often by private organization, students choose schools, faculty not in unions, etc.)
In general, private schools mean educational institutions that allow non-government or non-publicly-approved entity to make business decisions regarding management and operation. But it’s primarily focused on funding and resources. It’s NOT the same sort of school privatization we see in the US, like having ex-corporate CEOs or hedge fund managers through backdoor channels that will allow them to disregard the set of school accountability, ethics, and standards (i.e., hiring superintendents and teachers with appropriate credentials, transparency in school funding and expenditure, etc.).
In many other countries, many of those so called private schools are still required to comply with each state’s (or country’s) education law regarding school management, appointment of school principals, hiring teachers, academic performance, student discipline, quality instruction etc. They are not allowed to dodge taxes under the name of corporate entity while claiming public status for receiving tax payers’ money from the state–like many charters and vouchers do in the US. That is illegal. They will likely be prosecuted, if it happens.
Ken,
The majority of charter schools are stand alone schools, and difficult to categorize. The Walton Rural Life Center Charter school is small, rural, and the charter is held by the local school board. It is not run by hedge fund managers. At the other end of the geographic spectrum, the Community Roots Charter School is urban and some of the members of it’s board of governors are employed in the financial sector (other members include a librarian, a speech pathologists, and a Sackler Educator at The Guggenheim Museum)
What is amazing to me about ed reform as a way of thinking is the complete disregard of how one action within a system moves the whole.
Sometimes positively but just as often negatively.
The tech people baffle me, because that industry is grounded in systems thinking. My eldest son works in it. If there is one thing he’s good at, it is how pulling one string within a system can cascade in ways he may not be able to predict.
There seems to NO recognition of this in ed reform. They examine each piece in isolation. That’s nuts. I read these glowing reviews of charter schools and there’s no mention of the public schools in the area. How are THEY doing? Is this “about” public schools, or did we just throw them overboard without mentioning that piece?
Chiara: as in so many other instances, your comments get straight to an essential point.
😃
If I may, let me rephrase a bit of what you and some others have written on this thread.
Remember that one of the most powerful arguments of the charterite/voucherite/privatization crowd has been [not proclaimed too much lately] that their “innovative 21st century cage busting achievement gap crushing” ideas and practices will revolutionize all that stale old education nonsense that weighs down true progress. Truly the “new civil rights movement of our time” lead by disinterested folks like Bill Gates who knows for a fact—don’t get political on me!—that there’s no connection between Microsoft and CCSS and standardized testing/curricula/teaching/learning and Pearson.
Rheeally!
😡
You know, “think outside the box.” And then, of course, they try to put almost every student in the stifling “box” of high-stakes standardized testing. But let’s leave that for another time…
So the “rising tide lifts all boats” assertion. Catchy. Easy to remember. Sticks in one’s mind. A crushing rejoinder to the “education status quo.”
But let’s “think outside the box” for a moment—CCSS ‘closet reading’ left behind here…
What if instead of being the “rising tide that lifts all boats” the whole charterite/voucherite/privatization push is an “innovatively crushing disruptive tsunami of failed immoral practices and nonsensical theories and junk science”?
Then instead of everything going up up up, everything gets dragged down down down and gets crushed crushed crushed.
¿? Sorry, Edushyster, I guess I got off message.
Link: http://edushyster.com/?p=5366
Honest, Ms. Bee Eater, Chiara led me astray. You believe me, right?
“I reject that mind-set.” [Michelle Rhee]
Ok, guilty as charged.
Rising tide? No. Macerating tsunami. Yes.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
Krazy,
One problem with the argument that Sweden shows the failure of choice to create innovation in curriculum and pedagogy is that Sweden specifically prohibits innovation in curriculum and pedagogy a the building level. From the article that I linked to above:
“The private Swedish schools are not really allowed to innovate where it matters, with their pedagogic methods. The curriculum and rules in the classroom are determined by the state, which also trains teachers in the so called “modern” pedagogic theories. “Swedish schools have comparatively low levels of autonomy over curricula and assessments,” PISA notes.”
The author goes on to argue that it is changes in the nationally determined curriculum and pedagogy that is to blame for this change. The much lower level of intended instructional time now in Sweden (741 hours well below the OECD average of 942), for example, might have an impact on student learning.
So are you for or against Common Core then, TE? Because your description of the curriculum in Sweden sure sounds a lot like CC.
LP,
I am agnostic about the CCSS primarily because my state would institute state standards that are unlikely to be any better (In fact, I suspect would be much worse) and because the math CCSS seem reasonable to me (those are the ones I am best able to judge.)
I pointed out the situation in Sweden because it suggests that there was very little in the way that families could choose the approach to education that best suited their student. This is what I take to be the main advantage of allowing schools and students to be matched up by something other than street address.
All I can say is thank God there’s a standardized test that allows us to make accurate inferences about how good each country’s schools are!
Right. That’s definitely something I have to remind myself of. But even so, standardized tests are the measure that conservatives and technocrat liberals believe tell us what we need to know. So by their own standards they’re failing in Sweden.
FLERP, I don’t put much stock in the international test scores until someone claims to have found the silver bullet that will raise test scores. Then we look at the scores and the silver bullet disappears.
Lost in all this hand-waving by the conservative refuters is simply this: why didn’t Friedman’s methods succeed? Forget for a minute that things got worse, who got worse, and why. And remember that these methods were supposed to *improve* things. But nowhere is there evidence for that.
They succeed in reinstating racial segregation, seemingly a not-so-hidden agenda.
Well said, Friedman’s ideas with vouchers (skolpeng as we say) were supposed to improve things, but no, we haven’t seen any evidence of that. On the contrary. And we see a segregation here too. Something I really don’t like that! Not only in the school system, but also in health and elderly care.
The test would be to see if private schools are successful. Unlike schools in Sweden, private schools in the United States can choose pedagogy as well as curriculum. Some who post here have sent their children to private school, perhaps they can offer an assessment about how good an education their students are receiving/have received.
For all the reasons we have mentioned before, the public schools in my town, and the surrounding communities as well, are competitive with the top private schools. With notable exceptions,TE, charter schools are hardly comparable to private institutions. As a group, they have failed to meet any of their original goals and have become tools for the destruction of the public school system, particularly in urban areas. Even though they are not necessarily held to the same standards and accountability measures as public schools, they fail to out perform their public counterparts as they should be doing routinely according to their own assertions.
This part of the Slate article made me LOL:
“Even in a place like New York City, where charter schools have proven to be popular and successful, they enroll less than 5 percent of the city’s 1 million students. The city maintains control over its numbers through the issuing of a fixed number of charters. It’s easier for New York’s Department of Education to watch more carefully over hundreds (rather than thousands) of charter schools, pressuring the ones that are underperforming and shutting them down if they can’t turn things around.”
I am trying to remember the last time the NYC Department of Education closed a charter school. It happened once, maybe more. Very rare. Also, when the state scores came out last August, the charter schools posted exactly the same scores as the public schools.
Citing anything from Slate is cringe-inducing. It’s like Matt Yglesias never left.
That Slate article has praise for Kipp and Uncommon Schools and portrays the charterization of New Orleans as a success story. Yikes
I think it’s completely valid to measure ed reform using their own measure, which is test scores.
I recognize they’ve now moved the goalposts and it’s no longer “great!” schools but instead “choice!” but the measure WAS test scores and continues to be tests scores for public schools.
I love how they’ve moved the goalposts in a way that puts public schools at a disadvantage too.
They can’t win this game. If their test scores go up they pull out the trump card, which is “choice!”
You lose again public schools! We forget to tell you the measure was “choice!”
“I think it’s completely valid to measure ed reform using their own measure, which is test scores.”
It’s valid in a pretty limited way. It’s a lawyerly kind of argument, e.g.: “Even assuming, arguendo, that the standard urged by plaintiffs applies here — which it does not — the record shows that plaintiffs have failed to meet that standard.” It’s valid as a way to demonstrate what’s false, but it’s useless as a way to demonstrate what’s true, because the argument disavows its own premise. In this instance, the argument may be valid to establish that voucher proponents make bad arguments and therefore that people shouldn’t believe them. But it doesn’t tell us whether the voucher program has made schools better or worse.
I should have written that “[i]t’s valid as a way to demonstrate what has not been shown to be true,” rather than “what’s false.”
Arguing on reformers’ turf is probably counterproductive, or at any rate not terribly helpful.. But politically I’m not sure another turf exists. At least not right now.
The other predictable effect of vouchers in Sweden is segregation. Social and economic segregation.
Interestingly the scores on the PISA exam fell for students of all SES status. That suggests we might want to look for national causes that would impact even the 1/3 of municipalities that have no private schools at all, but saw the same decline.
Chiara: spot on.
My position on high-stakes standardized testing is well established on this blog.
I’m agin it.
But the charterite/privatizer crowd uses the scores generated by standardized tests to label, sort and rank—and then reward [few] and punish [many]—as bludgeons against public education when they speak to a largely innumerate and somewhat naive general public.
Well, here’s a news flash: the vast majority of the edupreneurs and educrats and edubullies don’t have a clue about how such tests work, or what they can and can’t do, or that they are being used in unethical and abusive ways. No, they leave the “explanations” up to their accountabully underlings who peddle VAM and 100% graduation rates and the like.
When pressed, the self-styled leaders of the “new civil rights movement of our time” can’t defend one of their most reliable weapons of choice against public education. And the bean counters in their employ resort to fantastical numbers/stats sleight-of-hand that put Michael Jordan to shame—showing themselves less as lovers of “large data sets” and more as “outliars” [thank, larry!] that betray an all-to-human desire to cover their collective tochus.
Hit ‘im where it hurts, in one of their most vulnerable spots. Any wonder why Michelle Rhee and David Coleman and the like don’t want to get in a public forum with Diane Ravitch? Inevitably the talk will get around to the numbers/stats game—and what oh what are they gonna say?
Not-A-Thing. The best they can do is a RheeFlee, all the while intensifying their Rheeality Distortion Fields so as to convince themselves they’re not running pell-mell from a 75-year-old historian of American education but it’s all “for the kids.”
Yes, stand steadfast and firm on the logic of their Marxist principles:
“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” [Groucho, of course]
😎
School choice has certainly worked wonders in Finland, oh wait. There are no charter schools in Finland and private schools are virtually nonexistent as well. Home schooling is unknown in Finland.
Finland has fallen out of favor. Too many inconvenient facts in that country.
Clearly you have not read The Smartest Kids in the World. Don’t worry. None of them read it either but it was well-placed for the CC roll-out.
So Milton Friedman’s crackpot economics surrounding education have failed in Sweden, Venezuela, and the USA (just like his economic policies to preserve the 1% fail to aid anyone else repeatedly around the world time and time again) yet it has become part of the received wisdom of conservatives and neoliberals (conservatives with empathy) and therefore will forever more accepted as an unassailable truth and its supporters will hotly argue that the failed ideas cannot fail but they are failed by poor actors ad infinitum. Standard, boilerplate modern politics.
At some point reality will rear its head and consume those who defend the indefensible and it usually doesn’t end prettily according to history.
Chris, Milton Friedman’s voucher plan for education failed in Sweden and Chile, and wherever they have been applied in the USA, notably Milwaukee.
Sorry, for mixing up Chile and Venezuela — I was reading an article about Venezuela at the time. Not good at multi-tasking, I guess. My rigor and grit must be slipping.
Don’t forget what’s happened in Chile. Sweden is the second country to discover the disasters caused by school choice and private sector for profit education paid for by taxpayers.
After 25 years of school choice in Chile, there is no evidence it improves education. In fact, the evidence points out that it leads to increased sorting as the best public school students are lured away form the public schools to the for-profit schools leaving the most difficult to teach and at risk kids behind.
The conclusion of the Columbia study is worth reading. Click the link and take a look.
One pull quotes from the study’s conclusion:
We show that the first order consequence of the voucher program in Chile was
middle-class flight into private schools, and that this shift does not seem to have resulted in achievement gains, certainly not of the magnitude claimed by some choice advocates.
Click to access HsiehUrquiola(2006).pdf
Yes well. Darwinian theory is damned fine but there are some over-interpretations of it that have caused a great deal of mischief. This includes the widely accepted notion that competition is engine that drives improvement.
Competition is about winning, not making things better. Even research in biology has shown that there is more diversification when competition is low, eg after mass extinctions, and less when there is a lot of competitors. Conservatism is a safer strategy in that circumstance.
C Sent from my iPad
If a country like Sweden had problems with privatization of schools, just think about the long term consequences for a country like ours. Sweden is known for their excellent social policies and support system. We have Wall Street and income inequality that keeps growing and a Congress that is dysfunctional and out of touch with most Americans. Let’s keep trying to inform those people out there who are so confused about charter schools, etc. It isn’t their fault. They are not getting the right information.
I’m intrigued by the article that TE cites. It seems to suggest that Sweden’s decline in performance (assuming the PISA tests have any real value –a big “if”), is due to bad pedagogy and curriculum mandated by the central government. I can easily imagine how this, not privatization, could be the real smoking gun (not that I think privatization yields any real benefits). So now I’m curious to know what “best practices” Stockholm is forcing on its schools, private and public. I wonder how they might compare to Common Core-sy practices that being foisted on our schools.
I think you are right! The inequlity and segregation plays a big role. Schools aren’t working in a vacuum! You have something I’m missing here in Sweden: tough debaters like Diane (whom I really like).
Perhaps Sweden’s decline is the result of its switch from traditional to progressive education.
Here’s what Tino Sanadaji, the article’s author, writes:
“But in my view, the main culprit was the experiment with radically new pedagogical methods. The Swedish school system used to rely on traditional teaching methods. In recent decades, modern “individualist” or “progressive” pedagogic ideas took hold. The idea is that pupils should not be forced to learn using external incentives such as grades, and children should take responsibility for their own learning, driven by internal motivation. Rote memorization and repetition are viewed as old-fashioned relics. Teacher-led lectures have increasingly been replaced by group work and “research projects.”
Grades have been abolished below the sixth grade, and homework heavily reduced. According to TIMMS (a test similar to PISA), the average hours Swedish students spend doing mathematics homework declined from 2.1 hours per week in 1982 to 1.1 hours in the late 2000s. Despite criticism from teachers, the Swedish school board has ruled that pupils are allowed to have mobile phones and wear caps in class.”
I don’t give much for Tino Sanandaji. He hasn’t worked in school, and he has no education in teaching, as far as I know, no experiences from working in school. And I don’t think the decline in results are due to more “progressive” teaching! We had that kind of teaching in the 60s already, and if a method works it’s because of the teacher more than the method. Students are different, so a teacher needs a lot of tools and methods. But in the slimmed organizations we have also in schools today teachers don’t get the resources they need to really meet all students needs. Teachers have steadily gotten a lot of new tasks that has little with the work with the students.
Our current school minister Jan Björklund, whose politics many working in school don’t like, advocate a more authoritarian style, something I don’t like at all.
In the bigger cities, where most people live they have a lot of free schools, and everywhere where you have free schools you segregation tendencies. If student wear caps in school has vetry little with school achievements to do. That they have cellphones is maybe more problematic.
Principals don’t necessarily have to have experiences from working in school either. And free schools get permission to start from the school inspection that really can puzzle people around. At the same time the school results are dropping. And we try with more and more of the same medicine. Crazy!
PS. When I read the last reply a little more thoroughly I can’t help notice that Sanandaji doesn’t really seem to know what he is talking about.
Just a reminder about an earlier comment in a different thread- test results function in a closed system. Unless they are linked, through cause and effect, to a beneficial outcome outside of the system, the measurement is irrelevant. A tie-in to GDP growth would be ideal.
We can’t expect any recommendations for education, that come from hedge fund owners to succeed. Their firms drain GDP. If they had the right answers to productivity, their ideas would be employed and be effectivein the financial sector.
I noticed that a few data points didn’t make into this Slate article.
Since 2000, when the PISA test was first administered, Swedish private schools have lost just 6 points overall, while Sweden’s public schools have lost 34 points over the same period.
http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=24673
Secondly, he didn’t take into account the influx of immigrants to Sweden in recent years.
http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/assessing-immigrant-integration-sweden-after-may-2013-riots
I also noticed that he failed to recognize that privately schooled students only makeup 14% of Sweden’s total student population. Whereas, Belgium’s percentage of privately schooled students is 65%. The PISA scores of the privately schooled students in Belgium have been on average higher than their publicly schooled counterparts, at a lower cost per pupil.
http://educationnext.org/school-choice-international/
Overall, the critical thought utilized to ascertain the conclusions founded in this article can be described as disappointing, at best.