Sweden’s School Choice Disaster

So it turns out that the good results of the Swedish school voucher system of “free” school choice, long the benchmark for all sorts of rightwing busybodies wanting to disrupt public schooling were created by, well, cheating:

It’s the darker side of competition that Milton Friedman and his free-market disciples tend to downplay: If parents value high test scores, you can compete for voucher dollars by hiring better teachers and providing a better education—or by going easy in grading national tests. Competition was also meant to discipline government schools by forcing them to up their game to maintain their enrollments, but it may have instead led to a race to the bottom as they too started grading generously to keep their students.

Hands up anybody who didn’t see this coming? Thought so.