#70. More Evidence that Government-Imposed School “Reforms” Increase Student Suffering: The Case of Sweden.

Once a model nation for humane treatment of children, Sweden has succumbed to the international competition for high test scores.

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Dear friends,

I began my deep dive into the mental health effects of government-mandated school “reforms” when I became interested in why anxiety, depression, and suicide rates among school-aged teens in the U.S. started to rise sharply around 2012, following a twenty-year period in which those rates had at first fallen gradually (for 15 years) and then held steady (for another 5 years).

Some people were claiming that the sharp rise was the result of increased use of smartphones and social media by teens, beginning around 2012. But when I searched extensively for research evidence supporting that theory, I found it lacking (see Letters D6 and #45). This was not because no research had been done. Indeed, literally hundreds of such studies had been conducted, using a variety of methods, and dozens of systematic reviews of the research had been published.

What I found was that the research, regardless of method, consistently revealed either no or very small effects of smartphone or social media use on teen mental health. Where small effects (or, more accurately correlates) were found, they were nearly as likely to be positive as negative. I also found that essentially nobody who has conducted research in this area supports the smartphone/social media theory of the large rise in teen suffering (see, for example, Odgers, 2024). Sadly, the public has been paying great attention to the opinions of people who have not been involved in such research and apparently have not looked carefully or objectively at the research, while ignoring the scientists who know what they are talking about. So now we have a wave of people in the U.S. who think the problem of teen suffering can be solved by depriving teens, at least young ones, of smartphones and/or social media.

The failure of the smartphone/social media theory led me to explore an alternative theory of the rise in teen suffering—the school pressure theory. In the United States, 2012 was the year when most states adopted the Common Core Curriculum, which dramatically changed the nature of schooling across the country by adding high stakes testing in selected subjects, narrowing the curriculum to focus on test drill, and using those test scores to evaluate teachers, schools, and school districts. Teachers became far less free to engage students in creative and intellectually enjoyable activities, as administrators began cracking down on anything that didn’t seem to them to be oriented toward improving test scores. For some of the evidence supporting the view that Common Core is a major cause of the sharp rise in U.S. teen suffering, see Letter #51.

Then, to test further the school-pressure theory, I became interested in what happened in other countries where governments in recent years mandated national curriculum “reforms” largely aimed at improving the nation’s ranking on the international PISA exams. I’ll write more about PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) testing in another letter, but I mention it here because this is the main underlying reason for the educational “reforms” that have occurred in some countries over the last 15 to 20 years. Pundits and politicians in the U.S., the U.K., and Sweden were embarrassed to see that some other countries, especially East Asian countries, were dramatically outscoring students in their country on those tests.

So, the governments mandated school changes designed to make their schools operate more like those in the high-scoring East Asian countries. They didn’t bother to look at the suicide rates among kids in those countries, nor to think deeply about whether the tests truly measure qualities of mind that are important for a satisfying and productive adult life. It just became a kind of contest among countries to see who can squeeze the highest test scores out of kids. The kids became pawns in a terrible international game. And, as schools within countries began to compete for highest test scores, the game also became intranational.

In moving beyond the U.S. I started with the UK. You can read my findings on that in Letter #69 if you haven’t already. As the school pressure theory predicted, the rise in suffering there did not start in 2012 as it did in the US, but instead started in the 2017/2018 school year, which was when their new school mandates took full effect.

And now, in this letter, I turn to Sweden.

Alas, Sweden, what have you done? I have always imagined SwEden to be some sort of Eden for kids—or at least relatively so, in comparison with other countries. No more.

An Essay that Led Me to Look into Sweden

I was alerted to changes in schooling in Sweden a few weeks ago when I read an essay by Becka Koritz, entitled How Sweden Is Failing Its Children, published online (here). Becka describes growing up happily in Sweden, in the 1970s and ‘80s, “in a culture where the well-being of children was the focus,” where she and her peers “felt listened to and respected as human beings—smaller, but with roughly the same rights as adults.” Through elementary school she attended a municipal Montessori school, where she was trusted and allowed to follow many of her own interests. She acknowledges that things were not so great, even then, when she entered secondary school. Her secondary schooling, in the 1980s, sounds a lot like my secondary schooling in the U.S. in the late 1950s and early 1960s—unnecessarily restrictive and boring, but not painful, and little enough of it to leave considerable time outside of school for self-directed activities.

But then, according to Becka, a couple decades after she was done with school, Swedish schooling changed. She writes, “When the educational law changed in Sweden in 2011, the freedom and relative flexibility that I had as a child disappeared. The wish to guarantee all children’s success has led to a curriculum that allows no flexibility: every child now has to learn the same thing, at the same time, and at school. … I am certain the consequences have been dire for all children. More homework, more evaluations and at earlier ages, Swedish children are under so much more pressure today than we ever were in the 70’s and 80’s. This leads to stress levels skyrocketing, to many children being prescribed sleeping pills in order to get a good night’s rest, and to anxiety and other symptoms of burnout.”

So, I wondered, just what changed with the 2011 education law and is there research documenting effects of that change on kids?

How the 2011 Revision of Swedish Education Law Changed Schooling

I’ll start by listing some of what the AI genie told me, on the Internet, about Sweden’s “Revised Education Act” of 2011 (slightly modified to fit what I learned from further research):

• A new national curriculum was introduced, applying to all forms of compulsory education in Sweden, with new general goals, guidelines, and syllabus.

• Mandatory national subject tests, which were already in place beginning with year 8 were added for years 6 and 7 to assess student progress.

• The old Swedish grading system with four grades (Pass with Distinction down to Did Not Pass) was replaced with a six-grade system (A to F), where A to E are passing grades and F is failing. [The purpose was to create finer distinctions among the levels of passing by increasing the number of such levels from three up to five.]

Subsequently, through reading what Swedish scholars (especially Lundahl et al, 2017) have written about the Swedish “reform,” I learned of a particular Swedish twist to it. Sweden has a long tradition of favoring teachers’ grading of students throughout the year rather than relying heavily on end-of-year exams, so they tried—awkwardly, it appears—to hold to that in their “reform.” Rather than put more weight on end-of-year exams, they developed detailed criteria that teachers had to follow in grading students throughout the school year. All students, at any given grade level, were now expected to learn the same information as all others at that level, and teachers were required to take steps to prove they learned those things. I assume this is what Becka was referring to when she wrote, “Every child now has to learn the same thing, at the same time … .”

Those steps generally required teachers to test their students frequently during the school year to be sure they had learned what they were supposed to learn. They had to back up their grading by showing evidence that the grading was based on students’ learning the required curriculum. Regardless of details of how the “reform” looked on paper, the effect was like that of “reforms” in the US and UK: Teachers now had to teach a one-size-fits-all curriculum, regardless of students’ interests or lack of interests, and teachers were held accountable for students’ “learning” that curriculum. [Of course, “learning” here means holding it in mind long enough to pass some sort of test on it, not learning in any meaningful real-world sense.] As one set of researchers (Hogberg et al, 2021) put it, “Thus, unlike test-based systems, school-related pressure in the Swedish system is not concentrated on specific test periods but is continuous throughout the school year, thereby increasing the risk of chronic stress.”

Research Evidence of Effects of the Swedish “Reform”

Research assessing rates of student-reported school pressure and teen mental health between 1988 (when such assessments first began) and 2011 revealed little change over that time (e.g. Nygren & Hagquist, 2017), but subsequent research has revealed increased rates of these following the school “reform” that took effect in the 2011/2012 school year. In one study, Björn Högbert and colleagues (2020) analyzed the Swedish results from the Health Behaviors of School-Aged Children (HBSC) survey, which is conducted every four years and involves children in grades 5, 7, and 9 (ages between 11 and 16 years).

They found that psychosomatic symptoms (calculated by adding responses to questions about headaches, stomachaches, dizziness, backaches, sleeping difficulties, and feeling low, nervous, and irritable or bad tempered) changed relatively little and in no consistent way between 1994 and 2010, but then rose significantly from 2010 to 2014, and continued to rise between 2014 and 2018. Based on data provided by the researchers, I calculated that such symptoms increased by 23% between 2010 (the last assessment before the “reform”) and 2018 (six years after the “reform” had begun).

In the same study, the researchers also found that students’ reports of their experience of stress related to schooling increased after the “reform.” Using numbers found in the report, I calculated that school stress, by the measure used, increased by 37% between 2010 and 2018. In a separate study based on the same surveys, these researchers showed that the increase in self-reported school pressure for teens after 2010 was greater for Sweden than that for any of the other 25 European countries assessed in the surveys (Cashman et al., 2023). The researchers also cite previous studies showing that, across students, psychosomatic symptoms correlate more closely with self-reported school stress than with any other measures collected. Taken collectively, such research indicates that students’ ratings of psychosomatic symptoms correlate much more strongly with their reports of school pressure than with their reported experiences with family, friends, social media, screen time, bullies, or anything else tested so far.

In another study (Högbert et al, 2021), the same research team focused specifically on changes in school pressure and mental health for Swedish students in grade 7 compared to those in grades 5 and 9, using data from the same HBSC survey noted above. They predicted that the increase in reported school pressure and psychosomatic symptoms would be greater for students in grade 7 than in the other two grades, because the “reform” affected grade 7 the most. Prior to 2011, students up until grade 8 were not graded formally, in ways involving tests, but after the “reform” the formal grading system was applied to everyone from grades 6 on up. As predicted, they found that the “reform” increased self-reported school stress, reduced self-reported academic self-esteem, and increased psychosomatic symptoms more for the 7^th graders than for the other students. Moreover, the researchers showed statistically that the rise in psychosomatic symptoms was entirely explained by the rise in school stress and decline in academic self-esteem.

Alas, Sweden, what have you done? I can imagine you as SwEden no more, though perhaps you never were. But you were more in that direction than you are now.

Further Thoughts

And now, what do you think? If any of you live in Sweden, or once did, I’m particularly interested in your thoughts on what I have described here. I’m also interested in hearing about any other countries—countries where government mandates concerning curricula and testing have been imposed or altered--that you think I should look at to test the school-pressure theory of a rise in teen suffering. This Substack is, in part, a forum for discussion. Your thoughts and questions are valued and treated respectfully by me and other readers, regardless of the degree to which we agree or disagree. Readers’ thoughtful comments and questions add to the value of these letters for everyone.

I’m currently doing some research into South Korea, which for decades has had what may be the world’s most oppressive school system and highest rate of teen suicide, at least of countries for which these have been reliably assessed. There is some evidence, however, that that things have been improving there over the past 15 years or so (Kim et al., 2020), which I am looking into. School pressure may be becoming less because of a precipitous drop in the birth rate, so there are fewer kids competing for prized places in higher education. I suggest this now just as a tentative hypothesis, but hope to provide more on it in a future letter.

Another comment I should make before ending this letter is that every study I have found of effects of school pressures that separates the effects for girls and boys reveals that the effects are greater for girls than for boys. In this letter I reported only average effects for girls and boys combined, but if I were to report them just for girls they would be larger, in some cases much larger. That’s something worth discussing in a future letter.

One reasonable view, expressed by some researchers, is that girls are more conscientious about everything than are boys, including schoolwork, so they take the work more seriously and are therefore more negatively affected by increased pressure related to. Boys are a bit more likely to just blow it off. Another possibility that comes to mind is that, in today’s world, women’s’ abilities to succeed economically may depend more on higher levels of schooling than is true for boys. Perhaps girls realize this, so success at school is more important to them than it is for boys. That may also explain why, increasingly, at least in the United States, more young women are continuing on to four-year colleges than are men. — Something to think about.

Reminder to paid subscribers: If you are interested in attending our Zoom meeting on “The Challenges of Being a Trustful Parent in Today’s World,” to be held Saturday, March 22, 2:00 pm EDT for paid subscribers, be sure to register. Registration information is in my Letter of March 10. In the chat there you can also see information about the four panelists who will help get the discussion going.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

References

Matthew Cashman, Mattias Strandh, Bjorn Hogberg (2023). Have performance-based educational reforms increased adolescent school-pressure in Sweden? A synthetic control approach. International Journal of Educational Development 103. 102922

Björn Högberg, Mattias Strandh, Curt Hagquist (2020). Gender and secular trends in adolescent mental health over 24 years–The role of school-related stress. Social Science & Medicine 250. 112890

Björn Högberg, Joakim Lindgren, Klara Johansson, Mattias Strandh & Solveig Petersen (2021) Consequences of school grading systems on adolescent health: evidence from a Swedish school reform. Journal of Education Policy, 36, 84-106

Kyoung Min Kim, Dohyun Kim, and Un Sun Chung (2020). Investigation of the trend in adolescent mental health and its related social factors: a multi-year cross-sectional study for 13 years. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health, 17, 5405.

Christian Lundahl, Magnus Hultén & Sverre Tveit (2017) The power of teacher-assigned grades in outcome-based education, Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 3, 56-66

Nygren, K., Hagquist, C., 2017. Self-reported school demands and psychosomatic problems among adolescents–changes in the association between 1988 and 2011?Scand. J. Publ. Health, 47, 174-181.