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Of: TT
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Trollhättan will close two schools in the fall of 2021 and will instead transport students to other schools in the city.
According to Jonas Larsson Taghizadeh of Uppsala University, who is investigating school closures, there is much to back up the decision.
The red-green majority in Trollhättan will make the decision Tuesday at the Board of Education meeting. The ambition is to try to create a better mix of students in schools, break segregation in the municipality and raise school results. In total, about 300 students are affected.
“We are prepared to make changes that will benefit all current Trollhätte residents, but also future Trollhätte residents, who will be able to live in a society that defends all people,” Sofia Andersson Dharsani (S) says in a press release.
Controversial decision
One of the affected schools is Kronan in Kronogården district, which became known nationally due to the school attack in 2015 when three people were killed. The school now carries out teaching until the ninth grade. Starting in 2021, there will only be classes until the third year. The other school, Frälsegårdsskolan, is completely closed.
The decision was preceded by a lively debate. Several compilations of names have been made to save the schools and, in presentations to the local press, parents in the host schools have expressed concern that their children’s schooling may be adversely affected.
Positive attitude of the researcher
Jonas Larsson Taghizadeh, a researcher at Uppsala University, sees the measure positively. He has investigated the effects of around a hundred school closures in Sweden, though not with schools as low-performing as Trollhättan.
But in American research, there are similar examples with good results, where outcomes for students who have moved have improved after the move. The research also does not show clear negative effects for students who go to the receiving school, as long as the transferred students are distributed among different schools.
– There is a risk that you will get a very high concentration of students from closed schools in individual schools. If this happens, the host schools run the risk of becoming more similar to closed schools over time, if parents begin to choose to leave the school, says Larsson Taghizadeh.
In general, he is sure of Trollhättan’s decision, which he calls “brave”.
– The basic problem today is that we have a system with free choice of school and a principle of proximity that means that municipalities can do very little to control students. In that situation, this could be a reasonable measure, closing highly segregated schools.
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