Anders Bjorklund Livres

Almost 10,000 years ago the kilometer-thick continental glacier receded from northern Dalarna in central Sweden. Slowly but surely plants and animals invaded the barren grounds. The ice had left its mark on the land, especially during melting, when large amounts of moving water had changed the landscape. The animals that colonized our area came from Central Europe. Among them was the brown bear (Ursus arctos). When the ice had completely disappeared from Sweden, bears from Russia colonized Lapland, northernmost Sweden. This immigration from two directions has resulted m two genetically different lineages of brown bear in Sweden. Today there are four core areas with permanent bear populations in Sweden. The area north of the lakes Siljan and Orsasjon is a part of the southernmost bear area in the country. The bears in this southern area are not related to other bears in Sweden, but rather with bears in the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain. Today we have a population of about 1,000 bears in Sweden, of which about 200-300 are in the southern area. The bear, like other species, has certain requirements that its environment must provide if it is to prosper. The forests in northern Dalama and Orsa suit the bear Here is a magnificent natural area with high mountains and deep valleys, large wetlands and nature forests. The area has few people and wild animals abound. We are in Bear Country!

A large central government providing numerous public services has long been a hallmark of Swedish society, which is also well-known for its pursuit of equality. Yet in the 1990s, Sweden moved away from this tradition in education, introducing market-oriented reforms that decentralized authority over public schools and encouraged competition between private and public schools. Many wondered if this approach would improve educational quality, or if it might expand inequality that Sweden has fought so hard to hold down. In "The Market Comes to Education in Sweden", economists Anders Bjorklund, Melissa Clark, Per-Anders Edin, Peter Fredriksson, and Alan Krueger measure the impact of Sweden's bold experiment in governing and help answer the questions that societies across the globe have been debating as they try to improve their children's education. "The Market Comes to Education in Sweden" injects some much-needed objectivity into the heavily politicized debate about the effectiveness of educational reform. While advocates for reform herald the effectiveness of competition in improving outcomes, others suggest that the reforms will grossly increase educational inequality for young people. The authors find that increased competition did help improve students' math and language skills, but only slightly, and with no effect on the performance of foreign-born students and those with low-educated parents. They also find some signs of increasing school segregation and wider inequality in student performance, but nothing near the doomsday scenarios many feared. In fact, the authors note that the relationship between family background and school performance has hardly budged since before the reforms were enacted. The authors conclude by providing valuable recommendations for school reform, such as strengthening school evaluation criteria, which are essential for parents, students, and governments to make competent decisions regarding education. Whether or not the market-oriented reforms to Sweden's educational system succeed will have far reaching implications for other countries considering the same course of action. "The Market Comes to Education in Sweden" offers firm empirical answers to the questions raised by school reform and brings crucial facts to the debate over the future of schooling in countries across the world