The Malaise in the School System

Abstract

A significant drop in students’ knowledge and skills is not the only problem facing Sweden’s schools. The chapter discusses the emergence of a systemic malaise that includes grade inflation, increasing gender differences in performance, and declining civic mindedness. Moreover, the work environment is marred by rising levels of bullying, unacceptable levels of rule-breaking, truancy, and a high incidence of mental health problems. The chapter also discusses the deterioration of working conditions for teachers and the flight from the teaching profession. Teachers self-report that their professional status is low in society, teacher-training programs do not attract top-level students, roughly half of the students in those programs drop out, and a substantial share of those who graduate leave the profession after a couple of years. The wholesale introduction of NPM methods has robbed teachers of the professional autonomy that used to be a key element of the profession’s attractiveness.

As shown in the previous chapter, student performance in Sweden, as measured primarily by the large-scale PISA and TIMSS international assessments, has deteriorated considerably since the 1990s and early 2000s. However, at the time of writing, a significant drop in students’ knowledge and skills is not the only problem facing the school system. In addition, there is a deep malaise within Swedish education that takes many forms and affects both students and teachers.

The present chapter explores this malaise. We begin by reviewing the symptoms that relate to students, including systemic grade inflation, conspicuous differences in performance between boys and girls, a surge of undemocratic attitudes, pervasive problems with bullying, disruptive classroom behavior, truancy, and, finally, a significant rise in mental health problems. We then discuss the poor state of the teaching profession, which is marred, among other things, by low social status, a high dropout rate among students in education degree programs, and the loss of its professional ethos. We attempt to answer the question of the causes of these symptoms in later chapters of this book.

The Students

Grade Inflation

While the results of PISA and the TIMSS strongly indicate a decline in knowledge and skills among Swedish students, final grades paint a different picture. Paradoxically, during the very period in which the PISA and TIMSS scores fell sharply, the average merit rating (based on grades) in the final year of elementary school improved markedly (see Fig. 4.1).¹ This change is highly suspicious. Indeed, the disconnect between international assessments of Swedish students’ performance and their grades is compelling evidence of rampant grade inflation in Swedish elementary schools, and the same problem is evident in secondary education, according to research by the Swedish economist Jonas Vlachos.² The declining results in the diagnostic tests in mathematics taken by new students starting engineering programs at Chalmers University of Technology, who were accepted on the strength of their high grades, is another strong sign that the connection between knowledge and grades is equally tenuous at the secondary level.³

Fig. 4.1

(Source Swedish National Agency for Education [2001, 2004a, 2007, 2010, 2013a, 2014b] and OECD [2015]. Note Sweden changed its grade system in the fall of 2012, which makes comparability with previous grades difficult and explains why our figure does not include later years. It may be noted that the Swedish National Agency for Education’s [2014b] comparison shows that grade inflation was not halted by the introduction of a new grading system. They found that the average merit rating increased from 211.4 to 214.8 from 2012 to 2014)

Average merit rating 1998–2012 and PISA scores, 2000–2012

In terms of grading, Sweden appears to have returned to where it was at the beginning of the twentieth century, when “marks in Swedish schools had been unified in expression but not in meaning.”⁴ In the early 1930s, the Swedish psychologist and mathematics educator Frits Wigforss noted that the situation in regard to grading at the elementary level had become “chaotic” and that some measure needed to be taken to improve it.⁵ In response, Wigforss helped to design standardized tests as a means to regulate grades and make them comparable across schools, and these tests were implemented in the late 1940s. “The purpose would be not to dictate the assignment of marks to any student but rather to show teachers how the marks they were giving compared with those of other teachers.”⁶ The average results on the standardized tests in a class determined the average grade in the class, while the grade of an individual student could deviate both upward and downward from his or her test result. This norm-referenced approach imposed some needed order and moderation in the grading system and remained in effect as intended by Wigforss until the 1980s.

Grading at the secondary level was, after the early 1860s, moderated and controlled by the formal final examination (the studentexamen).⁷ Under this examination system, traveling external examiners who were appointed by the Crown—often university professors—arrived at schools and conducted or oversaw oral examinations in different subjects (complemented by written examinations). This form of examination continued to exist until the 1960s and was considered a success. On its centennial in 1962, a historical review observed that it provided a uniquely fair system for awarding grades.⁸ Nonetheless, in 1968, the last group of students took the final examination, in part due to the rapid expansion of the number of secondary school students after World War II.⁹ After that, standardized testing became the method of preventing arbitrary grading decisions and grade inflation at the secondary level as well.¹⁰ As an additional form of control, secondary school teachers were required to justify in writing why they wanted to assign grades that greatly diverged from the results of the standardized tests.¹¹

The purpose of this historical digression is to show that for a long time, the Swedish school system ensured that grades were fair and comparable. Research shows that students learn less when grading is not stringent,¹² but accurate grades are particularly important in a country such as Sweden, where grades are the most important selection criterion for higher education. Until 1991, they were the only selection criterion for people entering higher education below age 25. However, the inconsistencies that we describe above clearly indicate major flaws in the way grades are awarded in Sweden’s schools today, resulting in substantial arbitrariness and unfairness in admission to tuition-free institutions of higher learning.

Boys versus Girls

Another noteworthy development in the educational system pertains to the academic performance of boys versus girls. As noted by the Swedish National Agency for Education at the time, the fall in performance in PISA 2012 was significantly (in statistical terms) greater among Swedish boys than girls. Compared to 2003, the overall result for boys declined in mathematics by 35 points (−26 points for girls), in science by 23 points (−14 points for girls), and in reading comprehension by 41 points (−26 points for girls).¹³ In TIMSS 2011, compared to TIMSS 1995, the overall result in science for boys in 8th grade fell by 51 points (−35 points for girls), while there was no significant gender difference in the decline in mathematics since 1995.¹⁴

In PISA 2015, as in the previous cycle, there was no gender difference in mathematics.¹⁵ However, in the OECD as a whole, boys outperformed girls in mathematics. The same appears to have become true in science. In PISA 2012, Swedish girls outperformed boys in science for the first time,¹⁶ and a small, nonsignificant advantage was observable in 2015 as well, while in the OECD as a whole, boys held a significant advantage over girls. In regard to reading comprehension, Swedish boys raised their results compared to girls in PISA 2015. In the previous cycle, the gap was a staggering 51 points in favor of girls, and the share of boys not reaching baseline proficiency Level 2 exceeded 30 percent. In 2015, this gap in reading comprehension, while still very large, had shrunk somewhat to 39 points, but the switch to a digital test likely influenced that result.¹⁷ These facts lend indirect support to the presumption that, on average, boys are disadvantaged relative to girls in the Swedish school system.

If we turn to Swedish measures of academic performance, the pattern of boys falling behind girls persists. A higher share of girls than boys reaches the knowledge requirements of each course; girls, on average, receive higher grades than boys in every subject; and girls leave elementary school with a higher average merit rating than boys. Interestingly, in this context, parents’ level of education does not seem to matter. As shown in Table 4.1, even among children of parents with the highest level of education, girls outperform boys.¹⁸ It is also noteworthy that a staggering two-thirds of boys with parents in the lowest educational category failed at least one subject in the final year of elementary school.

Table 4.1 Share of students who did not reach the minimum knowledge requirements in at least one subject in 2019 in grade 9 and the educational attainment of their parents (%)

Clearly, the gender differential in grades partly reflects a substantive gender difference in knowledge attainment. However, there is also evidence to suggest that there is a grading bias in the educational system that affects boys negatively. A 2019 study compared students’ final mathematics grades in elementary school with data from a secondary school introductory test in mathematics administered yearly in the municipality of Stockholm to evaluate the quality of Stockholm’s elementary schools. There was a substantial difference between boys’ final grades and test results, indicating that boys are given lower grades than they deserve.¹⁹ Thus, it seems likely that boys’ lower grades are explained by a combination of lower performance and discrimination in grading.

Undemocratic Attitudes and “Fake News”

As we show in Chapter 6, one of the motives for abandoning the old educational system in Sweden and replacing it with the unity school in the 1960s was the Social Democrats’ hope that the change would foster more “democratically minded” citizens.²⁰ The responsibility of schools to inculcate democratic values in students is also laid down in Swedish law.

Ostensibly, Swedish schools appear to do a good job of educating students in democracy. In the latest (2016) round of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS), which examines the civic knowledge and attitudes of 8th grade students, Sweden stood out as one of the top countries.²¹ However, if we examine other available evidence, a completely different picture emerges. It turns out, for example, that a majority of Swedes aged 16–25 (with recent experience of the school system) support the idea of a technocracy in which power resides with an elite of experts.²²

In 2011, the political scientist and then leader of the World Values Survey–Sweden Staffan Lindberg reported in an op-ed in a national newspaper that 21 percent of Swedes aged 18–29 answering the WVS survey were willing to sell their democratic vote, and 28 percent were willing to electorally support a candidate standing for political office in exchange for a promise of a paid job.²³ Moreover, approximately 23 percent answered that they were indifferent about living in a democracy versus a dictatorship, and 26 percent supported the idea that Sweden should be ruled by “a strong leader who did not have to care about Parliament or elections.” In his op-ed, Lindberg compared the results to attitudes in less developed countries, such as Ghana, and pointed out that only a minuscule minority of older Swedes, who had their own memories of European dictatorships, wanted to discard democracy. He also noted that a mere 7 percent of young people in neighboring Denmark were prepared to sell their vote,²⁴ thus suggesting that such antidemocratic sentiments may be more widespread in Sweden.

In a 2007 survey conducted among young people in Sweden aged 15–20, a majority (56 percent) answered “Don’t know” when asked whether societies based on Western market economic concepts are democratic.²⁵ Moreover, 40 percent believed that the practice of Communism has led to increased wealth, and 22 percent supported the claim that Communism represents a democratic form of government. In general, the survey appeared to show “a significant uncertainty among the students on the meaning of basic concepts such as democracy and dictatorship.”²⁶ That was also the impression given by a 2005 report on the democratic competencies of Swedish 9th graders, which noted that the students’ understanding of fundamental democratic institutions was so weak that the high proportion of passing gradesin civics should be subject to scrutiny.²⁷

In more recent years, “fake news” and internet hoaxes have increasingly become a topic of concern to democratic societies. However, when the abilities of Swedish secondary school students aged 16–19 to display so-called civic online reasoning and separate credible and vetted information from false news and advertisements were tested, the results indicated that a majority of students struggle to do so. “While most students rate themselves as quite skilled at finding and scrutinizing online information,” a 2019 study found, “most of them (88 percent) could not separate news from advertisements in Sweden’s most-read newspaper.”²⁸ Moreover, less than half of the students (44 percent) identified a news text from Swedish public radio as more credible than what the study described as a propagandistic “right-wing populist text,” while 35 percent rated the texts equally credible. Thus, secondary school students appear to be “not very skilled at determining credibility in critical and constructive ways.”²⁹

A Dysfunctional Work Environment

The psychosocial environment in the classroom, and in the school more widely, plays an important part in children’s learning. A lack of structure and peace causes students’ survival instincts to react to perceived dangers and crowd out cognitive capacity for knowledge acquisition.³⁰ In the long run, exposure to disruptive peers has been shown to significantly reduce future earnings.³¹ Against this backdrop, it is disconcerting that every seventh student in the final year of elementary school in Sweden, in total 15,000 students, does not feel safe in school.³² Expressed in other terms, this means that three to four students in each class do not find school a safe place.³³ In some schools, as many as one-quarter of the students feel unsafe.³⁴

One reason for this state of affairs may be that bullying is on the rise. The share of students aged 11–15 who have recently experienced bullying in school increased from 12.6 percent in the 2013/14 school year to 19.4 percent in the 2017/18 school year,³⁵ and approximately one-quarter of all elementary school principals in Sweden report that abuse and violence take place in their schools every week.³⁶

There are also symptoms of a general social disorder in schools that affects students’ sense of safety and well-being and, ultimately, their chances of learning and performing well. Large groups of students in both (lower and higher) elementary and secondary education feel that there are severe problems with rule-following and norm-accepting behavior in their schools. For example, 50 percent of students in the final year of elementary education complain that rules are not being followed by other students. Moreover, 34 percent of students in year 9 of elementary school say that they find it challenging to work during lessons because of classroom disruption. These results are reinforced by the fact that one out of three elementary school teachers (33 percent) reports that the problem of maintaining order in the classroom cuts into a significant proportion of his or her teaching time.³⁷ More than one-fifth of 9th grade teachers also report having to wait a long time for students to quiet down before being able to even begin their lessons.³⁸

Other sources of disruption to the social order in school and student performance are late arrivals in the morning and truancy.³⁹ Sweden has one of the largest proportions of students who arrive late for school—more than one in two 15-year-old students (54 percent)—among OECD countries.⁴⁰ The propensity among Swedish students to skip classes during the school day also exceeds the OECD average.⁴¹

In this normless environment, many students face educational failure. Indeed, one-quarter of all students at the elementary level leave school without having met the knowledge requirements for a passing grade in at least one subject, and more than 15 percent leave without a passing grade in one of the three core subjects, Swedish, English, and mathematics, meaning that they are ineligible for secondary school entrance.⁴² Among students at the secondary level, roughly one-quarter fail to graduate within the normal three-year period.⁴³ For those students, the consequences are severe because “[t]he Swedish labor market is particularly unforgiving of those with weak qualifications.”⁴⁴ Less than 70 percent of those who have failed to graduate from secondary school are employed, and their incomes are only 60 percent of the median income of 45-year-olds, compared to an average employment rate at age 33 exceeding 90 percent and incomes averaging 80 percent of the median of 45-year-olds.⁴⁵

Mental Health

The final symptom of a malaise in Swedish education that relates to students is an increasing problem with mental health. For example, depression and anxiety among children aged 10–17 increased by more than 100 percent from 2006 to 2016. According to the National Board of Health and Welfare, the reasons for this dramatic increase are most likely linked to schooling and the transition from school to adult life.⁴⁶ Similarly, physicians have suggested that the soaring prescriptions for ADHD drugs in Sweden, where in several municipalities as many as 13 percent of boys are medicated for ADHD,⁴⁷ are related to factors within the school system.⁴⁸

More recent studies of students’ mental health also suggest that stress is becoming more prominent. For instance, in the 2017/18 school year, 73 percent of 15-year-old girls and 49 percent of 15-year-old boys reported feeling stressed or very stressed by their schoolwork, which was the highest rate recorded since the late 1990s.⁴⁹ Other milder psychiatric conditions, such as irritability, dejection, nervousness, and insomnia, have also significantly increased in prevalence since the mid-1980s among schoolchildren, particularly among girls.⁵⁰

The Teachers

The Low Status and Shortage of Teachers

An extensive body of literature documents the existence of “teacher effects” on students’ educational achievement.⁵¹ Hence, one would expect teaching to be a respected and attractive profession in Sweden, as was the case during “the silver age” of Swedish education.⁵² However, in 2013, only 5 percent of Swedish teachers deemed that their profession was considered prestigious, and barely half said that they would choose the same occupation again.⁵³ It is also clear that fewer people want to be teachers. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to speak of a crisis in teacher recruitment in Sweden. Approximately 10 percent—13,000 teachers—leave the profession every year due to retirement or (more often) career change to another field, while the annual number of newly graduated teachers is merely half as large.⁵⁴

The main reason for the shortage of teachers is a high dropout rate among students in education degree programs, which have by far the largest dropout rate of all comparable college programs.⁵⁵ Among those training to become a teacher in the upper grades of elementary school and secondary school (ämneslärare) or a teacher in the lower grades of elementary school (grundlärare), 35 percent and 26 percent, respectively, drop out at an early stage, and a mere 47 percent and 60 percent, respectively, eventually graduate.

Another significant component of this crisis, reflecting the lack of status afforded to teaching at the time of writing, is the number and selection of applicants to education degree programs. In the early 1980s, there were approximately 10 applicants per place; in more recent years, however, the number of applicants has varied nationally between 1.2 and 1.9 per place.⁵⁶ The number of applicants for mathematics and natural science programs is particularly low.⁵⁷ This suggests that the most talented Swedish students are no longer attracted to teaching as a career. Indeed, a sizable share of applicants have left secondary school with low grades.⁵⁸ One-quarter of the applicants who began teacher training during the 2000s had a score of less than 12 points (out of a maximum of 20 points) on the university entrance scale, which is a substantially higher share than the average for students attending higher education in general.⁵⁹

The share of students with a working-class background and parents with low educational attainment has also increased, but perhaps the most noteworthy statistic is the share of teaching students whose parents were teachers themselves. In the early 1990s, 24 percent of male and 22 percent of female teaching students were children of teachers, but in the late 2000s, the share dropped to 12 percent and merely 10 percent, respectively.⁶⁰ In fact, children of teachers have fled from teaching at a higher rate than children of any other professional group,⁶¹ suggesting that many teachers have become deeply unhappy in their work and do not feel that they can recommend that their children follow in their footsteps.

Working Conditions

Teachers are one of the least satisfied groups in the Swedish labor market. In a 2006 survey, almost one-quarter of teachers reported being moderately or very unhappy,⁶² and judging by more recent information, the situation has not improved. More than half of Swedish teachers experience stress in the workplace, sick leave due to psychiatric disorders is more common among teachers than in other professional groups,⁶³ and four out of ten active teachers are considering leaving the profession.⁶⁴ Moreover, in international comparisons, such as the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) and the surveys of teachers in the TIMSS studies, Swedish teachers are the least positive about their working conditions.⁶⁵

The problem does not seem to be primarily a question of low pay. The relative wage of teachers stopped falling in the late 1980s⁶⁶ and has increased sharply in recent years. From 2010 to 2016, the average salaries for teachers in elementary and secondary schools increased by 27.5 percent and 24.2 percent, respectively, while the average increases for full-time white-collar workers and engineers (with a master’s degree) in the private sector were 14.5 percent and 12.4 percent, respectively. In other words, teachers’ relative wages increased by approximately 12 percentage points relative to comparable groups in the 2010s.⁶⁷ The primary sources of discontent are therefore likely to be found elsewhere.

One of the more likely reasons for teachers’ unhappiness is that threats and violence directed against teachers became increasingly common during the first decade of the 2000s.⁶⁸ Since then, abuse in schools has escalated. According to the Swedish Work Environment Authority, the number of reported threats made by students in elementary and secondary school increased by 35 percent from 197 to 266 between 2014 and 2018, and the number of reported physical abuse cases increased by 89 percent from 319 to 602 during the same period.⁶⁹ The actual number of threats and attacks against teachers is significantly higher, as less than every tenth case is reported.⁷⁰

Unsurprisingly, against this background, one in five teachers say they go to work with trepidation,⁷¹ and as many teaching students have considered dropping out of their training because of concerns over the surge of threats and violence in schools.⁷² Add to this the pressure imposed by many parents on teachers. According to the Swedish Teachers’ Union, 70 percent of teachers have been pressured by parents to make changes to their teaching or award a better grade to an individual student, and more than half (54 percent) have been threatened with reprisals for not complying with the parents’ demands.⁷³

A number of public administration reforms have also changed teachers’ work environment and led many of them to lament lost autonomy and influence over working conditions.⁷⁴ Here, we refer to the controversial introduction of “new public management” (NPM) doctrines in Swedish schools (see Box 4.1). Since the beginning of the 1990s, tight controls on teachers and monitoring in line with NPM have increased, reflecting similar developments in other public professions.⁷⁵ Typical of the decline in teachers’ autonomy is that they are now obligated to remain on the school premises even when they are not teaching. They are expected to spend much of their nonteaching time documenting what they do in the classroom and the intellectual trajectory of individual students in their classes. These demands have reduced the share of work time at school spent teaching to barely one-third,⁷⁶ and the time available for preparation has dwindled. Thus, to the detriment of teacher satisfaction, teaching has become micromanaged and “proletarianized.”⁷⁷

Box 4.1: New Public Management, NPM

New Public Management, customarily abbreviated NPM, a term first attributed to political scientist Christopher Hood (1991), refers to an effort to correct perceived shortcomings of the “old” public management through the use of private-sector norms and techniques (Dunleavy and Hood, 1994).

Beginning in the late 1970s, variants of this agenda began to appear among Western countries and grew widespread in the 1980s and 1990s. The public-sector reforms that were implemented typically included some or all of the following seven elements (Hood, 1991, 1995): hands-on professional management; explicit standards and measures of performance; output controls coupled with rewards and incentives; disaggregation of units in the provision of public services; stress on private-sector styles of management practice; and discipline and parsimony in resource use.

By the early 1990s, this international trend had reached Sweden; NPM measures were then introduced into core areas of welfare provision, not least education (Jarl, Fredriksson, and Persson, 2012).

A Lost Professional Ethos

While the reduced autonomy of Swedish teachers contrasts sharply with the traditional understanding of the profession,⁷⁸ it might not have happened if teachers themselves (and their trade union representatives) had not changed their attitudes and abandoned the old professional ethos of teaching. As previously discussed,⁷⁹ older generations of teachers’ strong commitment to nonpecuniary goals and values afforded them considerable autonomy and freedom from bureaucratic encumbrances in their work. There were of course exceptions, but on the whole, teachers could simply be trusted to perform to the best of their abilities because they were driven by an intrinsic motivation to impart knowledge, which also endowed them with social status.

However, for some reason, Swedish teachers and their trade unions, by and large, lost that intrinsic motivation and came to emphasize extrinsic, particularly monetary rewards. Indeed, Swedish teachers believe, to a greater extent than their colleagues in neighboring Norway, that “individual pay motivate[s] them to do a good job.”⁸⁰ As an interviewed teacher and union representative explained, “One needs [individualized salaries]. If not, nothing happens.”⁸¹ Swedish teachers are also more inclined to behave individualistically and (often abruptly) change schools, causing disruption to students and colleagues, than teachers in the other Nordic countries.⁸² Research also suggests that the relative wage is a key factor in the decision to stay or leave.⁸³

When a traditional public-service ethos is lacking, other management principles, such as NPM, become necessary.⁸⁴ That is how NPM found its way into the Swedish school system. But why did Swedish teachers demote teaching, which previously was viewed as a vocation, to a regular job with primarily extrinsic rewards? Why, more generally, is the educational system at all levels, from the teachers down, in such poor shape? The remaining chapters provide some answers.

In Sum

We have shown in this chapter how a number of serious problems have emerged in Swedish schools in recent decades. A first obvious indication of a malaise is that the falling results in international assessments were not reflected in average merit ratings, which instead increased. As a result, what had been an excellent grade point average a few years before and had ensured admission to attractive university programs was no longer competitive. Moreover, boys’ grades became substantially lower. This reflects that girls perform better than boys, but there are also signs of boys being discriminated against in grading.

Among students, there is evidence of declining civic mindedness and inability to distinguish between credible information and “fake news.” Moreover, the work environment is marred by several problems, including rising levels of bullying, unacceptable levels of norm- and rule-breaking, truancy, and a high incidence of mental health problems.

The malaise is not restricted to students; teachers are also afflicted. Teachers self-report that their professional status is low in society, teacher-training programs do not attract top-level students, roughly half of the students in those programs drop out, and a substantial share of those who graduate leave the profession after a couple of years. A sharp rise in the relative wage of teachers in recent years has not succeeded in improving matters more than marginally. Absenteeism, psychiatric disorders, and exposure to threats and violence are far higher than in other comparable professions. Finally, the wholesale introduction of NPM methods has robbed teachers of the professional autonomy that used to be a key element of the profession’s attractiveness.