Lasse

I'm sitting here wondering if it's kosher for a teacher to blog about her political views. Mja. Let's say that it is.

Today is the first day of my summer vacation. My school has been open since 2006, so it was our second class of high school graduates that entered real life last Friday. Work wasn't quite over for us teachers though, as we still had our company's yearly conference/meeting to attend. The question was, what was I looking forward to more: seeing my colleagues in party mode or listening to the one speaker on the lecture list that made me drop my jaw, Lars Ohly?

Here comes the obligatory explanation of Swedish politics and whatnot. In Sweden, there are public schools (in the American meaning of the word; school that are financed by and run by the government) and there are "friskolor," which most closely resemble the American concept of "charter schools". They are financed by public funds (they receive a certain amount of money per student that attends the school) and, with a few exceptions, they must follow the same rules as any other school. The important difference is that they are run by a private company, which like all other companies wants to make some kind of a profit.

Lars Ohly is the head of Sweden's Vänsterpartiet -- the "left party". It used to be called "the left party communists," and though they've removed the communist bit from their names, it gives you an idea of where they stand politically. Of the 7 parties that make up Sweden's parliament, Vänster is most strongly opposed to charter schools.

This, and the fact that teachers are known to lean very strongly towards Folkpartiet (the Liberals, on the other side of the political spectrum), meant that I giggled when I saw that Lars Ohly would be speaking at our conference. A conference for Baggium Utbildning AB, operator of 41 charter high schools. Lars Ohly's audience would consist of 700 men and women whose monthly paycheck comes from a system that he thinks should not exist.

Oh, and it's an election year.

Ohly opened his speech by telling us that he believes it's important that there's a school out there for everyone. He worked on a government initiative which had as its goal that 50% of all Swedes would continue on in higher education after high school, but he understands that not everyone -- heck, not even 50%, he says -- should be an academic. There have to be "practical" schools, schools for people who want to be carpenters and plumbers and hairdressers and everything else that society needs but that often gets looked down upon in relation to fancy degrees and university pedigrees. But, he continued, we're making a mistake if we give these more hands-on students an education that is devoid of the theoretical; of math and English and civics and everything other kind of knowledge that may not seem important in a car mechanic's or an assistant nurse's working life but which is important for every individual citizen in their everyday, private lives and for their participation in a democratic society.

This, according to Ohly, is where the current conservative government is going wrong with education. And this, according to me, is about where his audience started to squirm in their seats.

It's not that we didn't agree with him. Well, I suppose I can't speak for the other 699, but I CAN say what our company's vision is: educate the future plumbers, carpenters, mechanics, florists, painters, and all other kinds of hands-on workers of tomorrow, in an apprenticeship-based format where they spend about 50% of their high school hours working at an honest-to-goodness company. "Everything that can be learned on the job should be learned on the job." But we also think it's important that all of our students become well-rounded and prepared for real life, not just working life. Future voters and law abiders need to know civics. Future homeowners and wage earners need to know math. And future members of a rather small European country in a quickly shrinking world need to know English. Our students study the same core subjects as all other high school students and are qualified for university studies when they graduate.

We agree, in other words, with Lars Ohly. Is that what made us uncomfortable? No, rather, it was merely the fact that he talked to us as though we didn't. Or, perhaps, as though WE did, but worked for a company that didn't. Was it the case that he wasn't entirely up to speed about our company, or was it all the OTHER schools he was talking about ("NOT you guys, you guys are good.")?

He continued by talking about how it's important to provide for those who make the wrong choice or who change their minds after choosing a certain program. Students in Sweden are forced to choose a specific educational program when they apply for high school, and that's a rather heavy burden we put on the shoulders of our 15-year olds. But what about those who discover "too late" that they've made the wrong choice? What if they finish high school, start working, and then discover that the job that they've trained for is really not their thing?

Then he came to the meat of the speech, the bit that we were all waiting for. "I can't come and talk to Baggium Utbildning without talking about charter schools." In short, Lars Ohly is sceptical to a profit motive in a system financied with public funds and which has a mission as important as educating our children. It leads to charter schools hiring unqualified teachers, skimping on the teacher-student ratio, and cutting corners wherever possible in terms of materials, school nurses, libraries, and all other forms of things that make an education richer but a school's wallet emptier.

His central critique of our concept -- yes, now he was getting personal -- is that we ought to have our students out at a workplace less often. "It's important not to abdicate responsibility for the student's education. Sometimes it works well, but sometimes it works really poorly."

Of course, I have translated his comments into English and shortened them, but I do not feel that I have paraphrased too brutally or corrupted the tone.

After his speech, Ohly took questions. I was hoping the microphone might come my way before time ran out. I was calculating our teacher-student ratio in my head and thinking about which of my colleagues were qualified. I was trying to piece together what he said at the beginning of his speech with the seemingly conflicting remarks he made at the end. But I didn't have to worry that his comments would go without opposition. I felt that the best comments came from the leaders of the company, perhaps because they took the words out of my mouth. But since this is my blog, I'll let myself get a bit more wordy and put it my way.

Charter schools are not subject to the same laws that require public schools to hire qualified teachers as often as possible. That doesn't mean that we don't. Baggium's goal is prioritize qualified teachers. When a qualified teacher isn't available, we prioritize highly skilled professionals with experience in their fields (that is, experience as plumbers, small business owners, etc.) with the good communication skills it requires to instruct young people and keep up a good relationship with the companies out students are placed at. Our hiring processes are, in other words, the same as at a public school. It's not an easy task finding a person who is both a plumber and has a teaching degree, no matter if the employee is a private or a public institution. In my eyes, a plumber with 30 years of experience and an open and pedagogical attitude is preferable to a person who's never held a wrench (or, for that matter, much better than no teacher at all). In the case of core subjects, 80% of Sweden's working teachers are qualified. At my school, that number is 100%. Perhaps because our school doesn't hire unemployed civil engineers to be math teachers and then work around Sweden's school laws to avoid having to fire them when a slightly more expensive qualified teacher comes along -- a practice not at all unheard of at public schools.

But our core teachers are not "just" qualified. I have a Swedish teaching degree in mathematics and English, but I also have a master's in math, English is my native language, and my education in computer science and art make me a valuable asset at a workplace where students have to be taught to use our intranet, computers often have to be fixed up after our students have used them, a website has to be administrated and a whole mountain of addresses, grades, and schedules has to be databased with pedantic precision. None of these things are necessary in order for me to count as an officially qualified teacher, but they make me a better teacher and a better employee. They are valued by my employer, both figuratively and literally: I command a salary more than 10% above what I would receive at a public school, where my age and number of years of experience would have been plugged into a formula and my "extra" merits would be verbally praised once or twice but otherwise ignored. The story is much the same for my colleagues in our core subject department. Add to the fact that our employer provides salary bonuses after 5 and 8 years of experience or after we've done something "above an beyond" our everyday duties that benefits our students, as well as the fact that they help our unqualified teachers become qualified by providing classes or time off of work for studies, and many of Ohly's criticisms fall flat on their face.

So we clearly don't skimp on our teachers, whether we're talking qualifications or purely in dollars, so what do we skimp on? Surely something has to give if the company is going to make a profit? We don't have the money to buy all the equipment we would need to train a mechanic, a plumber, or a groom. We can't have a state-of-the-art workshop on site or a fully functional stall with 5 horses. But we don't have to. We put our students where those things already exist, where they get to learn by doing instead of just reading, and that gives us more freedom to invest in textbooks, a school library, healthy school lunches instead of re-heated, transported, mass-produced food-like substances. Ohly's main critique of our schools is that our students are too often at a workplace and too seldom at school, but aside from "learning by doing" being the core idea of our company it's also what allows us to have the resources to build a better school and gives our students the ability to discover "hey, this job really isn't for me" long before they graduate. It doesn't mean we abdicate responsibility for our student's education -- a theory that our work subject teachers can disprove by showing how many miles they drive every week to visit and evaluate our students at work.

Pure numbers can say a lot. Ohly mentioned that the teacher-student ratio in Swedish schools has dropped from 9.1 teacher per 100 students to 8.3 to 100 in recent years. At Baggium's schools the average is 10.3 and at my school it's 12. And that's not counting the mentors at our student's work placements. In core subjects, our students are in groups of about 16 -- about half the size of groups at the public schools. In their work subjects, the groups are even smaller. I know the name of every student at my school and have had all but a handful in some subject. Since we tend to get kids who don't think school is fun, this level of attention is incredibly important. So Ohly? We're not skimping.

You can tell that I really believe in what we're doing at my place of work. I don't believe it's a concept that would have developed or survived in the public school system. And after my company has been doing it for 11 years, we've been noticed by the current government and been made a "model school" for the high school reforms being planned for next year. And I believe in the concept of charter schools and choice in education enough that my son will be starting at one this fall. "Sometimes it works really well, but sometimes it works really poorly." Ohly's words apply very well to the public school system.

I don't have much hope that Ohly's opinions would change after standing in front of 700 teachers (representing 5000 students) that prove the opposite. But I think something he mentioned at the beginning of his speech says a lot. His son is a student at one of our schools. I guess he doesn't think we're so bad after all!