Swedish Meatballs

By way of a piece by Charlie Pierce, here's a Reuters story pointing up one of the big problems with Privatized Schooling - something that everybody seems to understand -  except of course the boneheads making the decisions:

(Reuters) - When one of the biggest private education firms in Sweden went bankrupt earlier this year, it left 11,000 students in the lurch and made Stockholm rethink its pioneering market reform of the state schools system.
School shutdowns and deteriorating results have taken the shine off an education model admired and emulated around the world, in Britain in particular.

"I think we have had too much blind faith in that more private schools would guarantee greater educational quality," said Tomas Tobé, head of the parliament's education committee and spokesman on education for the ruling Moderate party.

In a country with the fastest growing economic inequality of any OECD nation, basic aspects of the deregulated school market are now being re-considered, raising questions over private sector involvement in other areas like health.

Two-decades into its free-market experiment, about a quarter of once staunchly Socialist Sweden's secondary school students now attend publically-funded but privately run schools, almost twice the global average.

--and here's Charlie's closing graph--

There is, of course, a lesson for the United States here, and very likely a lesson to which nobody will pay attention. If you allow a system in which public education is privatized so that some people can make a buck on it, then making a buck is going to become the primary raison d'etre of the system. (See also: health-care.) The more ungainly the scramble for profit, the less your educational system has to do with, you know, actually educating people.

If there are decent jobs in and around the school districts, then the neighborhoods improve.  Better neighborhoods make for better schools.  Better schools make for a better labor pool.  A better work force makes for a better economy, which makes for more jobs in local neighborhoods, and then... oooh, look - then it starts over; it's almost as if all those things are interconnected.

But wait - it's not like the "boneheads making the decisions" are really all that dumb.  They're very much aware of the probability for any given enterprise to fail, so then we're left to wonder - is this just a matter of blind corporate avarice driven by a narrow ideology, or are we looking at a concerted effort to beat people down?