Result of pioneering experiment may offer way of levelling corporate playing field for female high-fliers “There is no ‘I’ in team, but there is in win,” the basketball star Michael Jordan famously observed. But now it appears that such an emphasis on the role of the individual is a very male approach when it comes to competing. Indeed, a study suggests that women are much more willing than men to compete as part of a team. Nearly two-thirds of the “gender competition gap” – the gap between the likelihood of men or women to enter a competition – disappears when people are offered the chance to compete in two-person teams rather than as individuals.Academics Andrew Healy and Jennifer Pate claim that their findings, published in the Economic Journal , have important implications for the design of competitive environments, such as elections and corporate career ladders. The pair believe their research reveals that competing in teams “levels the playing field” by encouraging a higher number of qualified women to take part and discouraging unqualified men. They argue that this insight should help organisations to select the best-qualified leaders. The economists conducted an experiment in which the participants had to answer maths problems as quickly as possible. Participants in teams decided whether they wanted to be paid according to the number of problems their two-person team answered correctly or whether they wanted to enter a competition against three other teams. Individual participants decided whether they wanted to compete against three other individuals. The results highlighted huge differences between the genders: ■ Even though men and women performed equally well on the task, 81% of men chose to compete as individuals compared with 28% of women. ■ When participants competed in teams, the gender competition gap shrank by 31 percentage points to 22%, with 67% of men choosing to enter the competition compared with 45% of women. Previous research has shown that a man is much more likely to choose to compete compared with a woman, even when the two are equally good at a given task. The professors claim their study suggests that this gender competition gap can be narrowed by simple changes to the environment in which competitions are held. The economists suggest the gender competition gap may help to explain the continuing lack of women in positions of power. There are only five women CEOs of FTSE 100 companies. The likes of Angela Ahrendts at Burberry, Cynthia Carroll at Anglo American and Dame Marjorie Scardino at Pearson are extremely rare. However, a new way of measuring their performance – one that focuses on their ability as part of a team rather than in a testosterone-loaded, gladiatorial-style competition – could change this, the economists suggest. “It appears to be the case that women often opt out of entering these competitive environments,” Pate said. “Importantly, while qualified women opt out, unqualified men opt in. As a result, the gender competition gap may result in organisations failing to select the most qualified leaders.” Healy added: “The results of this study have implications for the nature of competitions. Competitions held on the basis of team performance rather than individual performance may attract more women – and fewer men.” The findings also have signficance for the world of politics. Women are much more likely to be active in politics in countries with party lists than in those where a single person is elected. For example, in Germany and New Zealand, where representatives are elected by each method, the economists claim women are about three times more likely to be elected from the team-based competitions than the individual ones. Gender Women Equality Women in politics Jamie Doward guardian.co.uk
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Negative experiences could make many people avoid reporting future incidents, according to research Thousands of victims of crime are being so let down by the justice system they are less likely to report incidents in the future, according to new research. A report released on Sunday, based on official government data and survey findings by charity Victim Support , claims that guidelines on dealing with victims are routinely broken and that public confidence in the criminal justice system is being undermined. Under the victim’s Code of Practice , which sets out rules for dealing with the victims of crime, affected individuals must be updated at least once a month about the progress in their cases until the investigation is closed. Victims must also be informed about key events such as arrests, charges, bail, summons and remand. However, the charity found that victims are kept informed about their case to a satisfactory level in only around half of all reported crimes. It said that in a third of cases victims heard nothing more from the authorities after reporting the crime. Victim Support said that where people were kept well informed by the police, 96% were satisfied with the way their case was handled. Those who received “sufficient” feedback were 43% more likely to report a crime again, while a third were more likely to become a potential witness. Javed Khan, chief executive of Victim Support, said: “Time and again victims tell us that they’ve been kept in the dark by the criminal justice system. “Lack of contact and information about their case can make them feel uncertain and isolated, and worsen the distress caused by the crime itself. This not only erodes a victim’s confidence in the justice system but, as our report suggests, makes it less likely that they will report crime again.” The findings arrive as the post-riot debate over law and order intensifies with Labour warning that, if the government ploughs ahead with certain key policies, outbreaks of future disorder will be harder to police. Attempting to position Labour as the party that is tough on crime, shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper attacked government legislation on CCTV and DNA, saying they would impair the police’s ability to tackle widespread riots. Ministers are seeking to remove hundreds of thousands of DNA profiles from the national police database, increase regulation on the use of CCTV to ensure they are used “appropriately” and scrap antisocial behaviour orders (Asbos), which Labour say are effective in tackling gang activity. Cooper said the net effect was dismantling the apparatus that helps keep Britain’s streets safe, and that in one London borough police had told her that a third of looting arrests were based on DNA identifications. She added that the repeated CCTV appeals by police underline the importance of CCTV in regulating the streets. She added: “The gap between David Cameron’s rhetoric and the weak policy reality is striking. For all the tough rhetoric, the government is weakening the fight against crime in crucial areas.” She said the issue was compounded by the planned cuts that could cause 16,000 police officers to lose their jobs across England and Wales as forces make savings. The London School of Economics recently warned that the coalition’s planned cuts to officer numbers threaten to cause a 6% rise in
Continue reading …President Obama’s speech Thursday night was one of his best ever delivered, and thank goodness he is making a huge political push on the all-important jobs issue. It was a good night for him, and he needed this badly for his political standing. But progressive activists should neither fall into a posture of uncritical support, or just focus on the negative sides of the speech, policy, and political strategy, as sometimes is done by our more hardcore brethren. We should take a critical eye to what is good and bad about the policy, and enthusiastically support the good side while strongly opposing what is bad; we should applaud that he has gone bigger and bolder than conventional wisdom in DC said he would or should, while calling for even more boldness because this package isn’t enough to get this economy out of the deep, deep hole it is in. The President needs to have a left flank, not just because of political positioning but because progressives have a moral imperative to stand strongly for what the right thing to do is. We should not let the fact that we are conflicted on the President’s proposal slow down our willingness to take action to fight for what we believe in, either. We need to be strong and clear in what we are calling for, and fight for everything we believe in with every muscle we have. Let’s start with the negatives: The President using right-wing talking points on how Medicare and Medicaid have to be cut is unconscionable. The fact that he wants to focus on jobs is wonderful, but claiming that we need to make cuts in Medicare and Medicaid benefits to pay for it is a terrible Sophie’s Choice: who do you want to sacrifice, workers or seniors? It’s terrible politics and terrible policy, and should be completely rejected. The problem with Medicare and Medicaid costs has to do with the health care industry — many providers, drug companies, insurers — driving up both public and private health care costs. We don’t need to cut benefits, we don’t need to squeeze already hurting states on Medicaid costs, and we don’t need to raise the retirement age. This Georgia “jobs” plan the President has adopted as his own is right-wing economics at its worst: make unemployed folks work for free, and rob unemployment benefits to pay for it. No analysis I have seen of the trade deals the President is supporting as part of his jobs package suggest that these trade deals will produce a net increase in exports. More exports, sure- but it’s the net number that matters in actually producing more jobs. The way these trade deals are structured, they are not likely to be a net plus in producing new jobs. Way too much of this package in general is more tax cuts for business, which economists generally agree has far less of a direct impact in creating jobs than direct spending to create jobs. As Rep. Jan Schakowsky said in introducing her terrific short-terms jobs bill, the best way to create jobs is to simply create jobs: in other words, to directly hire more teachers and cops and firefighters and road construction workers. One of the biggest disappointments about this package is a missed opportunity: the President shouldn’t just be focused on jobs, but on good jobs with good pay and good benefits. He should have announced that he was creating a White House office on good jobs, and executive orders to make sure that in all federal government contracting and procurement, the priority would be to work with companies that paid decent wages and had decent benefits. He could still do this, but the fact that in spite of some great rhetoric at the beginning of the speech about the importance of good jobs, none of the policy proposals in the speech seem directly related to insuring that new jobs that are created as a result of these measures will have decent pay or benefits. Another big missed opportunity: we should be helping pay for all these jobs programs with more taxes on the financial speculation that destroyed the economy in the first place. On the other hand there is a lot to feel good about in the President’s policy proposals, including: The fact that he is targeting help to small business rather than the big business behemoths that usually get most of the benefits out of government because of their lobbyists, the same companies that do most of the outsourcing of jobs overseas, is a great thing. Democrats and progressives need to be firmly and passionately on the side of helping small businesses, who have been so hard hit by this long and deep recession, survive and grow. Similarly, while as I said above I am leery of business tax cuts in general, targeting them specifically to companies that are actually creating new jobs is far preferable to the Republican approach of just throwing wads of money at any business or individual who is rich, and hoping that as a result they will trickle the money down the masses in the form of some new job somewhere someday. While I remain nervous about the long term politics of cutting the payroll tax, Obama’s focus on cutting taxes for working class people and raising them for the wealthy is exactly where we need to go. These road and school construction jobs are crucially important to rebuilding our economy, both in the short and long term. With all the teacher layoffs over the last couple of years, class sizes are ridiculously big. The new teacher hires are incredibly important, again both in the short and long term. The size of this package pleasantly surprised me. Given that early discussions in the White House had people advocating something far smaller, and given the conventional wisdom from the D.C. establishment about how modest he should be, the fact that Obama is pushing for $450 billion is better than I expected. I had told people at the White House that this package needed to focus on three words: big, urgent, and now. It seems like this meets that test. Now, just to be clear: I do not think it is enough. We need to be spending far more than this to really jolt the economy the way it needs to be jolted. Progressives need to be crystal clear that this is not enough. But given what it might have been, I am pleasantly surprised. On the speech itself, I have one thing beyond the policy I am really happy about, and one thing I’m really troubled by. Let me start with the latter: I didn’t agree with everything my friend Drew Westen said in his now famous NYT op-ed about the President, but I do wish the President listened to him more when it comes to the need to tell a story. I really think it was important for the President in the beginning of his speech to explain to people how we got to this terrible economic place. He just launched right into the policy, but without an understanding of how we landed in this awful place, I fear voters won’t understand how what Obama is proposing solves the problem. He needed to talk about how the irresponsibility of the last ten years — no oversight of Wall Street speculators, not paying for wars and big tax cuts to the wealthy — created an entire decade without job or income growth, and created the housing bubble — the combination of which wrecked the economy and put us in the deepest hole we have been in since the Great Depression. He needed to explain that times are not business as usual, that times like these create the need for bold and urgent action. By not doing that, I fear voters will not get why what he is proposing is different and needed, and will make it far easier for Republicans to just attack this as the same old stimulus policies that didn’t work before. On the other hand, the speech’s summary was great at context setting. When the President lays out the broad philosophical basis for why government action is needed, and why we need to all be in this together, he strengthens his case immeasurably. It was a wonderful closing, and really important to make those points. The language he used sounded like it came out of the speeches progressives have been giving for a while, and it is very politically powerful stuff. It is great that the President is out there with a big, bold jobs package. He took the advice of the progressive movement on that, and today he looks like a far stronger leader as a result. We still need to fight him on the things he is wrong about, and we still need to push him to do more, both in legislative proposals and in the things he can do through executive action . But he is in far better shape politically today, and as someone who strongly prefers a President Obama to a President Perry in the next term, I am happy.
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A memorial for the victims of Flight 93 was dedicated in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Saturday. Former President George W. Bush addressed attendees on the meaning of 9/11 and its tenth anniversary (video of entire speech follows): If you enjoyed this video, help make more possible by supporting NewsBusters. Go here to donate (there's also a PayPal option on that page). Without the support of our readers, NewsBusters would not be possible.
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• Press refresh or turn on the auto-update for the latest • Email rob.smyth@guardian.co.uk with your thoughts • Get all the latest scores here 10.32pm Andy Murray walks out on court, headphones on as ever. Presumably he’s listening to this . Nadal bounces out after him. On Sky, Boris Becker, Greg Rusedski and Annabel Croft all tip Nadal to win. 10.14pm The winner of this match will play Novak Djokovic in Monday’s final. He has just completed an epic victory over Roger Federer: 6-7, 4-6, 6-3, 6-2, 7-5. 10.02pm “So you want to know what’s going on in the world?” says Paul Taylor. “I’ll tell you what’s going on in the world. The world is gong to hell in a handbasket, if you ask me. That nice lady who ran over Reese Witherspoon the other day is being forced to retake her driving test just because she’s 84 years old. What kind of a dumb reason is that? For Christ’s sake, leave people alone, can’t you?” 9.50pm “You ask, ‘What’s the rumpus?’” begins Mac Millings. “I’ll tell you what the rumpus is. Some people dislike Andy Murray, but I don’t. His QF victory means that I have not missed a rarely-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rubberneck the 21st Century Sideshow Attraction known as Rob Smyth’s Fumbling Foray Into Tennis Commentary. It’s just like the other kind of Smyth Fumble, in that you’re in the dark, aren’t sure of the rules, and don’t know a forehand from foreplay. At least it’ll last more than a couple of minutes, eh? Unless there’s an early groin pull. Or a premature moisture stoppage. Etc.” Oh, Millings . Anyway, enough of that tennis lark . Recent MBMs/OBOs/GBGs have been far too dull and full of, y’know, sport. What else is going on in the world? What’s the rumpus? Preamble The book says we may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us . It certainly ain’t through with Andy Murray. Every time he goes into a grand slam match against one of Federer, Djokovic and Nadal, he does so with a diabolical monkey on his back: a record two wins out of ten and eight sets out of 33 in slams against the big three. And that record is getting worse. Since beating Nadal in the quarter-finals of the 2010 Australian Open he has lost five in a row and trails 15-1 on sets. Murray knows that many people think the story has already been written, that he will continue to bang his heid against the brick wall for the rest of his career, and that he is never going to win a slam. Even when Federer retires he will have to find a way past Djokovic and Nadal, two men with the will of Keyser Soze. It’s enough to drive a man to the offy. For Murray, the first challenge tonight is not to beat Nadal; it’s to think he can beat Nadal. US Open 2011 US Open tennis Andy Murray Rafael Nadal Tennis Rob Smyth guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …In a two week span in which the East Coast of the United States was beset by a monstrous hurricane, states in the same area had their strongest earthquake since World War II and Colorado experienced its most violent quake since 1967, we were reminded once again of the important role played by federal government in our society. Now, I’m no constitutional scholar – like, say, Michele Bachmann – but I remember something in that document about government’s responsibility for “the general welfare”, which I can only assume means that if the state you live in comes to resemble Waterworld there is probably a useful role for the government in helping you keep your head above water. This is not only a progressive view of governance. It is also one rooted in reality and based on US history and culture. In the early days of the republic, the Congressional Act of 1803 provided assistance to a New Hampshire town damaged severely by a fire. This pattern would continue as Congress would help the victims of natural disasters in the two centuries to follow – not including Lady Gaga’s performance at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards or Tim Pawlenty’s presidential campaign, of course. The stories like the fire in New Hampshire, however, have not formed the dominant narrative since that actor-who-climbed-into-bed-with-the-monkey transformed government into something that was on your back or just for those “welfare queens”. Reagan and his ideological soulmates understood quite well that as Josef Stalin infamously said, while “the death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.” In other words, if Americans realize that a single-payer healthcare system will help protect their parents and children from disease, then they’ll be for it. But if it can be something abstract that just helps those other people who are mere statistics at best, supplied by an amorphous “big government” with no human face, long tentacles and the ability to force you to drink fluorinated water or strictly require a pulse to purchase a firearm – well, then, it’s easy to hate. And hate it they do. As long as it is government spending for you, and not them. Because the truth is, with very few exceptions, conservative elected officials (of both parties) are hypocrites when it comes to spending money. It’s probably why they hate that darn intrusive government until it’s time to collect those fat farm subsidies for the family estate, or that government-sponsored healthcare they happily take but would be a leftover Soviet plot with a side of El Che if it were offered to you. You need more examples? Well, how about the Social Security-despising, French-cuff cowboy himself, Governor Rick Perry of Texas? Man, does he hate that Obama stimulus plan – except for when he doesn’t hate it so much. Namely, when it helps him. According to the Texas Tribune, “Through the second quarter of this year, Texas has used $17.4bn in federal stimulus money – including $8bn of the one-time dollars to fund state expenses that recur over and over. In fact, Texas used the federal stimulus to balance its last two budgets.” Perry, of course, is far from the only tea party darling who takes his Earl Grey with some sugar and your tax dollars. There is Congresswoman Bachmann, formerly one of those “jack-booted thug” IRS agents, which she now claims was part of “knowing your enemy”. I guess that’s probably why she also learned to read. In any case, Bachmann seemingly decided to see Perry’s porking out on stimulus funding, and raise him a family farm and business, according to, among others, the Los Angeles Times : “A counseling clinic run by her husband has received nearly $30,000 from the state of Minnesota in the last five years, money that in part came from the federal government. A family farm in Wisconsin, in which the congresswoman is a partner, received nearly $260,000 in federal farm subsidies.” A quarter-million bucks of your and my tax money for her farm. She sure did get to know the enemy pretty well. Similar examples abound among other GOP presidential candidates, congressional leadership and party officials, as shame seems to have a very short shelf life in conservative America. It sure didn’t stop walking tea party bullhorn, Representative Joe Walsh of Illinois, from bellyaching about how we had to live within our means during our debt debate – as he was being sued for over $100,000 for deciding his former wife simply didn’t need funds for his three kids for the past decade or so. The practitioners of the tea party arts seem very comfortable with the idea. As Mark Twain once said, “nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.” Follow me on Twitter @cliffschecter Originally published at Al Jazeera English
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On Saturday, former President George W. Bush and his wife Laura honored the heroes of September 11th at the dedication of the Flight 93 National Memorial. Shortly after, the Bush Center released a video in which the former President invited people to help commemorate the 10th anniversary of the attacks by contributing to a historical record for future generations (video follows with commentary): “Ten years ago, the sun rose on a peaceful September morning. By the time it set, nearly three thousand people were gone – the most lives lost on American soil in a single day since the Battle of Antietam. But the courage of so many men and women who saved innocent lives that day will live with us forever.” – President George W. Bush To commemorate the 10 year anniversary of 9/11, the George W. Bush Presidential Center is asking you to share your 9/11 story – how did 9/11 change your life; what does the 10 year anniversary mean to you? This collection of stories – your memories – will become a permanent part of the Bush Center and integrated into the online museum experience. Those interested should visit the George W. Bush Presidential Center .
Continue reading …David Cameron urged to get tough with Russia over Sergei Magnitsky’s death
September 10, 2011 No Comment
PM should use Kremlin visit to raise the case of whistleblower lawyer’s death, say politicians from US and UK Former US presidential candidate John McCain is among a number of senior American politicians urging David Cameron to bar from Britain dozens of Russian officials implicated in the controversial death of a whistleblower. The prime minister arrives in Moscow on Monday, his first visit to the Kremlin, amid mounting international pressure to follow the lead of the US by introducing visa bans for individuals linked to the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. The 37-year-old was working for a British company when he exposed the biggest tax fraud in Russian history . After accusing Interior Ministry officials, Magnitsky was arrested and died in police custody after being denied essential medical care. Investigators say the father of two was tortured and badly beaten in the hours before his death in November 2009. The case has become a focal point for activists seeking to highlight state corruption in Russia. Cameron is being urged to make it clear that employees of British companies in Russia cannot be abused with impunity. In July the case prompted the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, to introduce a travel ban and freeze the assets of 60 Russian officials implicated in Magnitsky’s death. But even though Magnitsky was directly employed by William Browder , who runs a London-based investment fund, Hermitage Capital Management, the UK government has failed to act or even criticise the Russian authorities over the affair. On the eve of Cameron’s trip, senior US officials said he needed to demonstrate his human rights credentials. McCain, a US senator, told the Observer : “We hope the British government will seriously consider visa bans and asset freezes on the Russian government officials implicated in the torture and murder of Sergei Magnitsky, as we have proposed in Congress.” Democrat senator Benjamin Cardin, who tabled the Sergei Magnitsky rule of law and accountability bill , backed by 18 other senators, added: “I encourage the British and other governments to join the United States in imposing sanctions against the people who were involved in the death of Magnitsky. It is when allies work together on human rights that we can be most effective.” Pressure is also building on Cameron closer to home. Labour MP Chris Bryant, a former Foreign Office minister, said: “Britain should be making it absolutely clear that anybody involved in the corruption that Magnitsky revealed, or in his murder, is quite simply not welcome in this country. I hope Cameron is not going to be as gullible to swallow bland assurances by [president) Dmitry Medvedev and [prime minister] Vladimir Putin or be so eager to please that he fails to raise the important human rights abuses in relation to Magnitsky and [Mikhail] Khodorkovsky.” Khodorkovsky, the former chief executive of the oil company Yukos, was found guilty last year of theft and money laundering by a Moscow court, but is deemed a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. Cameron’s meeting with Putin will be the first official Russian contact with Britain since an unproductive bilateral meeting with Tony Blair during a G8 summit in 2007. Anglo-Russian relations remain tarnished by the murder of British citizen and Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 with a radioactive isotope. Britain has repeatedly asked without success for the extradition of the chief suspect in the Litvinenko case, former KGB officer Andrei Lugovoi, who has since been elected to the Russian parliament. Another former Foreign Office minister, Denis MacShane MP, believes Cameron should concentrate on bringing those responsible for Magnitsky’s death to justice. “After grandiose claims about promoting human rights in Libya, David Cameron should not wimp out of supporting human rights in Russia, especially when it concerns a British citizen, a London-based firm and his murdered lawyer. It would be deplorable if the US and other EU states took the lead while Cameron refused to take similar action.” Browder said: “The prime minister has a very simple decision to make. Does he want the Russian officials who sadistically tortured and murdered a lawyer working for a British firm to be allowed to enter our country and use our banks? This is not a question that the government can avoid by hiding behind bureaucratic language. How the government answers this question will send a strong message to dictators around the world.” Downing Street declined to say whether Cameron would raise the case with Putin. Russia David Cameron Human rights Vladimir Putin Dmitry Medvedev Europe Mark Townsend guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Exhibit A In The Partisan Take on Terror: Ahmed Warsame, Detained at Sea
September 10, 2011 No Comment
“Human rights” lawyers for suspected terrorists used to have a very receptive media to publicize their claims.
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Some parents and education experts believe the programme has failed to raise standards and caused segregation All over the Swedish port city of Malmö last week there were gaggles of students clutching brand-new laptops given to them on loan for the start of the school year. As schools fight over what, due to a demographic blip, is a declining number of students, the device you get has become a keen area of competition. “I’ve just got a mini-HP, but you can pay a bit more and get a Mac or an iPad,” says Mua Stanbery, 16, who has just started at ProCivitas, the most popular of the town’s profit-making free schools. Students arriving at the Thoren Business School have to make do with a Dell. But Pauli Gymnasium, the biggest municipal-run school, this year decided to give MacBooks to all its students to stave off private competition. What few of the students know is that the ultimate cause of their good fortune – the competitive system of free schools Sweden pioneered in the early 1990s – is under assault. SNS, a prominent business-funded thinktank, issued a report last Wednesday that sharply reversed its normal pro-market stance. The entry of private operators into state-funded education, it argued, had increased segregation and may not have improved educational standards at all. “The empirical evidence showing that competition is good is not really credible, because they can’t distinguish between grade inflation and real gains,” Dr Jonas Vlachos, who wrote the report on education, told the Observer . The report had a huge impact. It was a top story on Swedish television, and was hotly debated the next day in the newspapers. How the debate plays out will be watched carefully by education experts in the UK, where 24 free schools, built on the Swedish model, opened this year. Peje Emilsson, the founder of Kunskapsskolan, a private school company, attacked the research, deriding it as the worst report the thinktank had produced in 20 years. But Vlachos, an associate professor of economics at Stockholm University, is standing his ground. His argument is based on his finding that students who entered gymnasium [sixth form] from free secondary schools on average went on to get lower grades over the next three years than those who had entered with the same grade from municipal secondary schools. Vlachos suspects that, because schools rather than external examining boards mark students, free schools are more generous than municipal schools in the grades they give. “There’s been tremendous grade inflation in Swedish schools,” he said. Sweden’s path-breaking educational reforms of the 1990s have come under question since last December when the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development published the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment . This showed that Swedish students had dropped to 19th place out of 57 countries for literacy, to 24th in maths, and to 28th in science. This compared with 9th, 17th and 16th in studies done in 2000, 2003 and 2006 respectively. And Swedes, used to coming near the top of just about every human development index, were appalled. Jan Björklund, the minister of education, moved to tighten central control over schools and is soon to launch a parliamentary inquiry into competition and free schools. “Loopholes in the legislation have meant that free schools can elect not to have a library, student counselling and school nurses,” he complained. “And as they get just as much money as the municipal schools, the owners have been able to withdraw the surplus.” For now, Swedish parents and students still support the 1990s reforms and neither Björklund, nor the opposition Social Democratic party, are considering reversing them. But a poll carried out this year by Synovate found that Swedes who want to ban companies from operating schools for profit now outnumber those that don’t. Vlachos believes that the economic thinking underlying free schools is simply wrong. “It’s very difficult for people to make an informed choice of what’s a good school and that’s not conducive to a well-functioning market,” he said. Part of the problem is that students’ priorities aren’t always economic priorities. “There’s been an explosion of media courses and arts courses such as singing and dancing,” Vlachos said. “They’re not necessarily bad, but it’s not obvious that all these things are stuff that we want to subsidise with taxpayers’ money.” The other problem is unintended side-effects that damage society, such as increased segregation. This issue becomes glaringly obvious if you visit the two sixth forms in Malmö’s Western Harbour, a development of IT office space and tasteful eco-housing built on the city’s redundant shipyards. The first, ProCivitas, has some of the highest entry grades of any school in the city, and draws in some of the most ambitious teachers. There are only a few immigrant faces, teachers wear suits and the atmosphere in its bright, airy central lobby is like that of a trendy design company. At Kunskapsgymnasiet, just five minutes’ cycle ride away, the atmosphere could hardly be more different. Students lounge around in groups smoking and playing cards. Well over 60% are from immigrant or refugee families. Kristoffer Osterman, one teacher I spoke to, sports a hippie beard, long ginger hair, jeans and clumpy boots. ProCivitas students have an average of 280 out of 320 points, the highest in the city, whereas at Kunskapsgymnasiet the average for social sciences is only 180, with some students getting in with just 65 points. This has nothing to do with the schools’ managements. In Sweden, schools are only allowed to say how many places they have free. Each student gets their grades at the end of secondary school and lists the sixth forms they want to go to. The Malmö municipality fills the places in each school, both free and municipal, in order of grade. So if ProCivitas has 300 places, but 1,000 students want to attend it, then the municipality gives the places to the 300 students with the best marks. If on the other hand Kunskapsgymnasiet has 400 places and only 360 students want to go, the municipality will give them all places, even if they have rock-bottom marks. Per Ledin, Kunskapsskolan’s managing director for Sweden, argues that it is unfair to judge his company’s 32 schools by Kunskapsgymnasiet. “We have a surplus of capacity in Malmö, so we get people coming into our school who can’t get into other schools,” he said, adding that on average his students get 11 points higher than would be predicted by their socio-economic background. But when I visited the Malmö school, it was hard to see how. It was so noisy that I thought it must be break time. “Students here, they don’t have to do every task if they can show that they know it,” a teacher said. “English for example, they can learn from the TV and other places.” Much of the learning at the 32 schools in Sweden run by the company is done alone by students, using an online system, with one-on-one guidance from teachers once a week, interspersed with lectures in classes of up to 60 students. If students prefer to play cards and chat all day, it’s up to them. In his study, Vlachos argued that such systems were brought in as much to save costs as to improve education. Kunskapsgymnasiet’s IT-based teaching system allows it to cut the number of teachers it employs in Malmö to 5.1 teachers per 100 students, compared to an average of 8.2 teachers per 100 students at municipal schools. “Many municipal schools are horrendously bad,” Vlachos said. “But the difference between the free schools and the municipal schools is that the free schools actually have a profit incentive to reduce quality.” Kunskapsskolan can point to strong evidence that it works, but according to Daniel Rosen, a Spanish teacher at a state-run sixth-form college in the city of Uppsala, some Kunskapsskolan graduates who come to him have alarming gaps in their knowledge. “Some do have problems with handling their freedom,” admitted Osterman. “Freedom gives them less fact-based knowledge.” Peter Connée, who runs ProCivitas, argued that segregation was an unavoidable side-effect of the system. “Fifteen years ago in Sweden, we had segregation based on where you live, now it’s based on ambition and ability.” Osterman also doesn’t believe it’s necessarily a bad thing. “We are becoming a school for ambitious immigrants,” he said. But as I was leaving his school, one of his students, Mohammed Mahmoud, put it differently. “This is a school for criminals,” he declared, to laughter. “Nobody’s working in this school, because no one here has any future.” Sweden Free schools Europe guardian.co.uk
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