Immigration helps explain Sweden’s school trouble

Sweden’s education performance has faltered in the past decades, with scores tumbling in the OECD’s international Pisa survey since the early 2000s. Both the Guardian and the BBC have recently looked into this phenomenon. There’s no shortage of explanations for the poor results, but British enemies of school reform have latched on to one of them: the free schools reform of the early 1990s, which they claim sent the system into chaos.

You’ll notice how the naysayers never give any evidence to back up their claims. This is unsurprising, since there isn’t any to give. On the contrary, research indicates that free schools have to some extent cushioned Sweden’s fall. Free schools are also popular, as displayed by high demand, and enjoy higher satisfaction scores among parents than schools run by local governments. While the design of Sweden’s general school choice system is far from ideal, the pet explanation for the country’s educational decline among the British left simply doesn’t hold water.