Unruly customers? How parents’ (in)actions trouble civil servants and local school choice systems

ABSTRACT

Based on arguments about the need for greater individual freedom, school choice was introduced in Sweden in the 1990s. Swedish municipalities now set up local school choice systems, whose organization varies between municipalities. This study is based on interviews with three politicians and two civil servants from two average-sized municipalities with different school choice system designs and different political majorities. The aim of this study is to analyze how representatives of Swedish municipalities conceptualize their role and responsibility in relation to the role of parents in school choice systems, with a focus on school choice from pre-school to first grade. The analysis is focused on those instances in which parents fail to act as the design intended in the school choice system. The analysis shows that parents trouble the local school choice systems by both being passive and active when they are encouraged to make a choice.

KEYWORDS:

• School choice
• school allocation
• decentralization
• customerification processes
• public good
• private good
• Sweden

School choice in between the public and private good

The phenomenon of school choice entails, perhaps like no other educational phenomenon, the quandary over whether education should be considered primarily a public or private good (Levin, 1987; Wilson, 2008). Education is important both for the private individual’s chances of thriving in society, and for establishing common public values that serve the community (Levin, 1987). Advocates for school choice acknowledges parental rights to educate their children according to their own wishes (Pendola et al., 2021), while those critical of school choice tend of focus on the effects of school choice on increased segregation, when students no longer meet peers from other family backgrounds (Reay, 2017). According to others, school choice can be conceptualized as an opportunity to balance private rights and public social obligations through the educational system (Levin, 1987; Wilson, 2008). The American philosopher of education Wilson (2008) argues that the notion of public and private always are relative to each other and cannot be understood as static, separate terms. As such, she argues that the concerns regard school choice should be on “how education fulfills and balances both private and public aims” (Wilson, 2008, p. 9). Wilson (2008, p. 17) goes on to argue that different kinds of choice regimes needs to be examined in detail as “different choice policies, schools and practices enact certain qualities of public-ness and private-ness”. As dilemmas often emerge when school systems are expected to balance both public and private benefits (Levin, 1987; Singer, 2022; Vesterberg & Dahlstedt, 2019), it is vital to investigate how, in practice, “combined elements of choice and diversity with uniformity” (Levin, 1987, p. 631) are handled by those who organize education. The phenomenon of school choice can be regarded as part of the global educational shift towards a focus on individual rights (Arreman & Holm, 2011; Biesta & Lawy, 2006; Börjesson, 2016; Labaree, 1997; Lubienski, 2003).

School choice has been part of the Swedish school system, a focus in this study, since 1992. Sweden introduced compulsory public 6-year schooling in 1842 under the name folkskola. The right to public education was strengthened in 1962 by the introduction of compulsory comprehensive nine year elementary school, grundskola (Axelsson & Qvarsebo, 2022). This comprehensive system was heavily criticized during the 1970s and 1980s for being too centralized and inefficient (Karlsson, 2020; Vesterberg & Dahlstedt, 2019). Along with this critique came requests for increasing parents’ rights to choose which school their children should be placed in, and the school choice reform was implemented in 1992 (Muench et al., 2022). In short, the Swedish educational system underwent major changes during the 1990s. For the past 30 years, the responsibility for providing education lies, in a decentralized matter, with the municipalities (currently n = 290) rather than the state. Furthermore, the educational system now provides opportunities for independent schools to receive public funding through the establishment of a voucher system (every student brings their voucher to the school and takes it with them if they change school). All compulsory education in Swedish is financed solely by taxes, and no fees are allowed. This has created unusually favorable conditions for for-profit charter schools, where surplus from tax-funded vouchers is legally possible to distribute as profit to shareholders (Lundahl et al., 2013; Wiborg, 2015). As a result, the Swedish school system is now considered one of the most market oriented in the world (Vesterberg & Dahlstedt, 2019). A vast number of private actors are now operating schools around Sweden and the rapid marketization of Swedish education has raised concerns about “the gradual undermining of post-war policies for democracy and social justice within the Swedish welfare state” (Arreman & Holm, 2011, p. 237). Although this transition of the educational system is considered extraordinary, with a “strong discourse of excellence, performance and competition, another, that of social inclusion and equality” still remains within the system through the Educational Act (Lundahl et al., 2013, p. 499). As such, it is reasonable to assume that different conflicting educational goals are integral to the current system design.

Swedish municipalities design and organize school choice systems locally, and since such authorities have extensive autonomy in Sweden, the organization of school choice varies between municipalities. The current regulation in the Swedish School Act (Chap. 9, § 15 Skollagen, 2010) states the following:

A student must be placed in the municipality’s school unit where the student’s guardian wishes the student to attend. If the desired allocation would result in another student’s legitimate demand for allocation in a school unit close to home being overridden, the municipality must, nevertheless, place the student in another school unit. The municipality may otherwise deviate from the student’s guardian’s wishes only if the desired allocation would result in significant organizational or financial difficulties for the municipality.

This regulation in the School Act is open to interpretation regarding how both “a school unit close to home” and “significant organizational or financial difficulties for the municipality” are defined by the municipalities. The School Act requires municipalities to treat schools as both a public good and a private good at the same time. The former involves establishing equity between students independent of their geographical location and socioeconomic backgrounds (Chap. 1, § 8 Skollagen, 2010) while the latter emphasizes the freedom of choice for parents (Chap. 9, § 15 Skollagen, 2010). The School Act involves both formulations about how municipalities need to strive for school as public good: towards equity between students independent of their geographical location and socioeconomic backgrounds and school as private good: and freedom of choice for parents. This inherent tension in the School Act gives rise to the question about which good to promote in relation to children’s school allocation: Is it a responsibility located primarily in the public sphere (i.e., the municipalities) or the private sphere (i.e., the parents)? This is the core tension of education as a public or a private good. As such, the aim of this paper is to analyze how representatives of Swedish municipalities conceptualize their role and responsibility in relation to the role of parents in school choice systems.

Previous research on school choice and its actors in Sweden and beyond

Thirty years into the school choice reform, the Swedish educational landscape is increasingly characterized by segregation and inequality (Böhlmark et al., 2015; Muench et al., 2022; Trumberg & Urban, 2020). Studies on the correlation between students’ “economic, social and cultural status” (Muench et al., 2022, p. 10) in OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) PISA conclude that “[b]etter off families are in a better position to benefit from greater opportunities of school and curriculum choice” in Sweden especially (Muench et al., 2022, p. 14). In a recent study from Sweden, Gustavsson (2022) analyzes how the values inherent in justifying or rejecting school choice have varied over time. Since the 1990s, a discourse referring to freedom and individual responsibility in education has become increasingly dominant. However, this discourse has been questioned in recent years due to the segregation and inequality that school choice has created in the Swedish school system.

Educational scholars, both in and outside of Sweden, have identified a global trend of shifting educational concerns from the sphere of collective citizenship to a concern for individual customers (Mitchell, 2003; Peters, 2005; Wahlström, 2022). This development poses new challenges to education as the educational system has the contradictory goals of enabling individual rights while also ensuring that all students, despite their family backgrounds, can succeed through education (Abdulkadiroğlu & Sönmez, 2003; Gustavsson, 2022; Levin, 1987). Civil servants have a substantial role to play in order to lessen the negative effects of school choice on the aggregate while also allowing for parents to make choices (Dabisch, 2022; Wiborg & Larsen, 2017). Thus, parents and municipalities organizing school choice systems are recognized as two important actors for enacting local school choice policy in previous research. Findings related to these two actors from the Swedish context and beyond are presented below.

School choice tends to be viewed as part of responsible parenting for the middle-class by the parents themselves (Ball et al., 1995; Kallstenius, 2010). In the British context, Reay (2017, p. 143) argues that it is “middle-class parents who are over-anxious and powerfully invested in their children’s educational excellence”, for example by spending money on private tutoring, expensive leisure activities, and by moving to residential areas with “good” schools. Middle-class parents in Sweden, Great Britain, and the US, have also expressed worries about the outcome of their school choice in interviews (Ambrose, 2016; Reay, 2017; Shuls, 2018). Findings from Britain and Sweden show that active school choices are usually made by affluent families (Ball & Vincent, 1998; Trumberg & Urban, 2020). Political scientist Lidström (1999) argues that the establishment of school choice policy in the 1990s in Sweden can be explained by the strong influence of the middle-class on Swedish society and their increasing interest in their children’s education. In the Danish context, Wiborg and Larsen’s (2017) case study concludes differently that local municipalities and teacher union activists shape the success or failure of school choice policy.

Apart from Wiborg and Larsen’s (2017) study, other previous research has focused on how school choice systems are managed in local contexts. In the German setting, Dabisch (2022) studies different primary school allocation systems in local Berlin districts. Dabisch concludes that there is a significant variation between districts due to local policymakers’ political preferences for either school choice or social diversity. In Finland, local authorities seek to balance the social costs of school choice though strict regulations of the choice systems (Varjo & Kalalahti, 2019). In Sweden, Nyhlén (2011) focuses on how different municipalities with similar political majorities have created different strategies of centralized and decentralized governance in relation to private education actors. Based on interviews with Swedish servants, Varjo et al. (2018, p. 494) argue that an “apparent municipal deficit has occurred in Sweden” in relation to school choice. Still, previous conceptual research in economics argues that municipalities have a significant role to play in realizing education policies, for instance, concerning whether school choice is mandatory for guardians and how those who do not actively choose are managed (Andersson et al., 2018).

Based on previous findings, it is vital to study how Swedish municipalities conceptualize their role and responsibility in relation to the role of parents in school choice systems, because that can shed light on how they handle the tension between education as a private and public good.

Conceptualizing how citizens become customers

How the relationship between the state and the citizen is configured depends on specific contexts and must be studied in practice. There is not one way in which the state creates markets and in turn shape customers. Karlsson (2020) suggests four ideals for how the citizen is framed as a customer in relation to the state: the free customer, the absent customer, the regulated customer, and the locked-in customer. Each customer type creates different tensions at the nexus of simultaneously being both a customer and a citizen. Karlsson (2020) argues that, in relation to school choice, the customer–citizen should be regarded as a “regulated customer” on a quasi-market (p. 97); a customer type that can be regarded as problematic for the state to handle. What is provided is not just something that can be refused by the dissatisfied customer, but something that is mandatory, i.e., compulsory schooling. Karlsson (2020) introduced the concept of “customerification processes” to signify a shift in official language, information, and power regarding the use of common resources. He suggests that these processes take place in and through three contexts: a voucher system where citizens experience themselves as actors on a market; in information provided by the state to the citizens (for instance in printed and distributed information on how school choice works in each municipality), and in the language the state uses to address the citizens (e.g., which terminology civil servants use to describe the role of the citizens). This process, he claims, has meant that “individuals start viewing themselves as customers rather than citizens in relation to the public sector” (Karlsson, 2020, p. 100). He further argues that “a strong customerification process leads to a collective regression relative to the individual” (Karlsson, 2020, p. 104). The voucher system is already in place in all municipalities when it comes to Swedish school choice. Thus, the notion of customerification processes is used in this paper to analyze how ideas about the citizen-customer are conceptualized in local school choice systems, particularly by focusing on how civil servants reflect on their use of information, and in the language they use to describe the role of the parents. These theoretical conceptualizations of how citizens become consumers are utilized in the discussion to interpret the findings from the analysis.

Materials and methods

This study is based on qualitative interviews with representatives of two Swedish municipalities. The interviews focus on how the municipalities manage school choices for six-year-olds to first grade. Throughout the text, the municipalities are named with the pseudonyms “Solrup Municipality” and “Ekstad Municipality”.

Qualitative interviews enable us to investigate people’s experiences and perceptions of a given phenomenon. The experiences and perceptions graspable through interviewing can be relationally understood based on the interviewer–interviewee exchange (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009). As such, the epistemological claim in this research leans on a reflexive understanding of seeing the research interview as a site where understandings and meanings of school choice are negotiated and produced (Alvesson, 2011). This approach allows for a focus on one important aspect that constitutes school choice in Sweden: the local political level, where the meaning and definition of school choice are put into practice. Interviewing local elites, defined as “elected representatives and politicians, chairpersons, and executive staff members of influential non-government organizations and high level bureaucrats with influence over government policies” (Siritarungsri et al., 2013, p. 70), is an important methodological tool for grasping the views of politicians and civil servants regarding issues currently under political negotiation, such as school choice (see e.g., McEvoy, 2006). The interest here is in how representatives of Swedish municipalities conceptualize the role of parents in school choice systems. Interviews with people working on school choice policy were therefore important in addressing the research question. All participants were selected because of their responsibilities for organizing local school choice in their municipalities. Both politicians and civil servants responsible for educational policy in the studied municipalities were interviewed. In Solrup, the politically elected chair of the education board and a civil servant employed as the head of the education administration were interviewed. In Ekstad, the first and second politically elected chairs of the education board and a civil servant employed as the head of the education administration were interviewed. The interviews addressed the perceptions and experiences of the interviewees. The interview questions concerned the municipalities’ local design of the school choice system, how the systems had been developed and had changed over time, how the municipalities informed parents about school choice, what works well and what needs to be improved in the systems, and how the systems operate in practice. All interviews were transcribed, and the transcripts were read through to identify themes related to the research question. Via a close reading of the interview data, it was possible to identify how representatives of Swedish municipalities conceptualize the role of parents in school choice systems and with which language (i.e., terminology) they use to do so. All interviewee quotations are translated from Swedish into idiomatic and readable English, rather than providing literal translations that might be hard for non-Swedish speakers to make sense of.

The participants were first contacted via email, and the interviews took place via the video conferencing service Zoom, on which the conversations were audio-recorded. All participants consented to participate in the interviews and their consent was audio-recorded. The participants were informed about the aim of the study, that their identities would not be revealed, about their right to opt-out of the study at any time without providing reasons, and about how long the interview recording would be kept (all audio files are stored on a secure server at the author’s university).

The two studied municipalities have populations close to the Swedish average municipal size of 36,043 citizens (Ekonomifakta, 2022): Solrup has a population of 26,000 and Ekstad of 34,000 citizens. Solrup Municipality operates 10 elementary schools and Ekstad Municipality operates 12 elementary schools. The two municipalities were selected for the study because they display interesting differences and similarities. Solrup Municipality is governed by a conservative political majority and has the following three selection criteria for school choice: (1) the relative proximity principle; (2) sibling priority, i.e., whether older siblings already have a place in the school; and (3) miscellaneous (the meaning of this term is not specified in the policy documents). Parents in Solrup are required to make a school choice before their child begins the first year of school. Ekstad Muncipality is governed by a center–left political majority and has the following three selection criteria for school choice: (1) the catchment area principle; (2) sibling priority for those with siblings in school years one to three; and (3) lottery. Parents in Esktad are not required to make a school choice before their child begins the first year of school, it is rather framed as an option that they have. The two municipalities have several factors in common: both are relatively close to the average municipal size; each had one private school (i.e., a private Montessori school¹) in its territory at the time of the interviews, and both are located in the same region. Yet, the two municipalities display contrasting differences based on the differences in political majority and in the primary criteria for school choice. They were chosen in order to analyze how representatives in Swedish municipalities conceptualize their role and responsibility in relation to the role of parents in school choice systems.

The two municipalities’ main selection criteria for school choice

The Swedish School Act (2010) dictates that school choice is a right that parents in Sweden have. This paper is concerned with how the municipalities interpret school allocation through the Swedish School Act (2010). Although there are instances in the interview excerpts in which the civil servants report that the municipalities might act against the School Act, it is beyond the scope of this paper to judge how and if the local systems align with the School Act. The studied municipalities, Solrup and Ekstad, have different main organizing principles in their selection criteria for school choice: the relative proximity principle and the catchment area principle, respectively. The relative proximity principle, applied in Solrup, means that a new student has a right to a school allocation at a school near home, but only relative to fellow students’ distance from the nearest school. This principle is algorithmically driven and varies with the popularity of a school and how many students live near it. The catchment area principle, applied in Ekstad, means that the municipality draws yearly boundaries determining what school a new student belongs to depending on the specific demographics of six-year-olds each year. Depending on where the presumptive student lives, he or she will “belong” to a specific “catchment” school to which they have a prior right or in which they will be placed if no place is available in a different chosen school. When interviewing the representatives, it became clear that selection principles 2 and 3 rarely are used in practice when applying school choice. The politicians in Ekstad justified their catchment area strategy by noting that this strategy was easier to control for the politicians (versus an algorithmic principle such as the relative proximity principle) and easier to communicate to parents. The two politicians said that, in their experience, they received very little response from parents and that they “often didn’t hear anything at all”. Solrup municipality, in contrast, applies the relative proximity principle as its primary selection principle, and the interviewed civil servant commented on the difficulty of describing this principle to parents: “When guardians understand they find it strange, but they understand. The difficult thing is to communicate it in a reasonable way”. The interviewee further noted that “parents react when they don’t get the school they have counted on”. There seemed to be significant interaction between parents and civil servants; how this interaction was perceived is analyzed below.

School choice as a management problem

The present findings suggest that the intricate and potentially political nature of school choice policy is perceived as a management problem rather than a political problem. The interviewed local politicians seemed to perceive school choice as unproblematic. During the interviews, school choice was addressed as a matter of fact. Vesterberg and Dahlstedt (2019, p. 61) saw a similar approach to school choice in Swedish municipalities, where they concluded that “the political controversies of the past have been left behind, meaning that locally, education policy has become stabilized.” Similarly, all three interviewed politicians talked about the school choice policy as uncontroversial: “It is not a hot topic at all” (politician in Solrup); “No, we haven’t had a lot of discussions [regarding school choice]” (politician in Ekstad). One politician from Ekstad pointed out that the politicians do not make “political decisions about catchment areas – those decisions are made by civil servants” (politician in Ekstad). During the interview, the civil servant from Ekstad municipality noted that the responsibility for school allocation after school choice was hard to bear:

There is really a lot of work involved in this and if you haven’t worked on it, you can’t understand how hard or difficult, not hard but difficult it really is … And you get the feeling, somehow, that you are playing with children’s lives, like the families [i.e., families’ lives] are in our hands. All year they have believed that “we belong to this school so it’s all fine”. And then it turns out that this year you don’t belong to this school, because we [i.e., the civil servants] had to draw the boundaries differently. … I don’t think it is fair … 

Here the civil servant expressed how they and their colleagues in the administration struggled with the practical realization of Ekstad Municipality’s school choice system. The struggle to make the families’ school choice predictable were consequences of how the particular system design necessitated the yearly redrawing of catchment areas. The civil servant talked about how they thought it was hard for those who have not experienced the nitty-gritty of the system output to know how much work it actually took to assign schools to all new students in a fair way. Of the interviewed politicians, it was only the Social Democratic representative who said that they would have liked to be able to do more to reduce school segregation using the school choice system, but that they regarded their hands as tied by the current regulations in the School Act. In Solrup Municipality, in contrast, the algorithm-based relative proximity principle allowed detachment from the school allocation issue for both politicians and civil servants. In the Solrup case, the policy input and output were far removed from each other. Concrete political decision making about the allocation of school children had moved into the technocratic sphere of “automated thinking” (Sellar & Gulson, 2021) where the question of accountability for the decision taken is not self-evident. The depoliticization of an issue such as school choice, which is deeply political by nature, requires that both the system and its intended users, i.e., the parents and guardians, start viewing themselves as customers. Through analyzing the interviews, it is possible to conclude that there are several ways in which the “customers” are failing to engage with the system in the way intended by its designers. The analysis below suggests that the troubles this failure has created look different depending on whether the parents are regarded as active or inactive.

How inactive parents trouble the school choice system

Today, praise for making active choices is almost axiomatic in political discourses across the globe (Muench et al., 2022; Wilson, 2008). This idea of the citizen requires that the citizen be prepared to make active choices, often in the customer role. In the interviews, two different ways were identified in which inactive parents managed to trouble the intentions underlying the school choice system. First, this group troubled the system by not making an active school choice and, second, they troubled the system by creating extensive manual work for the civil servants. Two disturbances to the school choice system are analyzed below.

In interviews with representatives of both Solrup and Ekstad, it became evident that inactive parents caused a systemic problem by means of their passivity, which entailed the risk of their children receiving a suboptimal school allocation. All interviewees said that this effect of parents’ passivity was unfortunate – since this affected their children’s school allocation – but that the Swedish School Act did not allow the politicians and civil servants to act differently. One of the two politicians from Ekstad justified the municipality’s prioritizing of those who make a choice for their children by referring to the School Act:

The thing is that we are trying to have as many people as possible make an active choice because making an active choice weighs heavier than not making a choice, according to the School Act. We have had problems with students who haven’t made an active choice and are placed at a different school than what they had counted on and live close to, because someone else has actively chosen the school they live close to. We have experienced this and that’s why we are trying to … chase everyone down and have them make an active choice.

Here we can see how inactive parents seem to cause what might be called a disturbance in the system that ultimately prioritizes those who manage to live up to the municipality’s idea of the citizen as a customer on a market. The municipality are, in multiple ways, trying to inform parents about the importance of making a choice. The fault can be seen as placed on the inactive parents rather than on the system or the municipality designing the system.

It is also obvious that those who make an active choice not only get to have a say in what school they want for their child, but they also receive the chosen school allocation at the expense of those who have not made a choice. In this way, children of inactive parents risk suffering the consequences of their parents’ passivity, for example by being placed in a school farther from home that they do not wish to attend.

Representatives of both municipalities prioritized the school allocation of children of parents who had made an active school choice, explicitly stating that this was an effect of the system, at the expense of the inactive parents and their children. Representatives of both municipalities described how they strove both to inform and remind parents about how to make the school choice. Parents were reminded through both mail and telephone calls, with a focus on those who had not yet made an active school choice. This second type of trouble meant extensive work for the civil servants:

Interviewer: How are you handling those who don’t make a choice?

Civil servant in Solrup: We call them, we reach out to them

Interviewer: Okay.

Civil servant in Solrup: in any way we can, only this week we – there are only a few of us working in the administration – we rang the last few [parents] after several reminders.

Interviewer: All right.

Civil servant in Solrup: And if we can’t reach them, then we just place the child based on proximity [to the nearest school], but we really give them the chance to … if anyone failed [to make a choice] for one reason or another.

Interviewer: All right, okay, that it interesting, I haven’t encountered that before.

Civil servant in Solrup: Yes, we coddle [the parents] perhaps a bit too much here. We thought, there are those [parents] who aren’t very digital, there are a few individuals, and it feels unfortunate if their children are affected when it comes to the school choice.

Here we see how the civil servant conceptualized parental passivity as a problem since it caused the municipal administration to spend significant resources and time encouraging parents to make an active choice for their children. For those who still did not make a choice, proximity to home meant that a child would be placed in the nearest school with available slots after those who made active choices had been given their slots. It was not just the inactive parents who troubled the system; active parents also managed to cause trouble due to their unfair and/or insufficient interaction with the system.

How active parents trouble the school choice system

In a seminal study from Boston, Abdulkadiroğlu and Sönmez (2003) showed how school choice systems were manipulated by well-informed parents who made choices strategically rather than in accordance with their real preferences; these strategies negatively affected ill-informed parents and their children. Kessel (2019) reached similar conclusions about the Swedish context. In his sample, he noted that 9 out of 11 municipalities could be manipulated by well-informed parents. In Solrup, both the politician and civil servant explained that the municipality had recently reformed the local school choice design to allow for only one choice. This was done because, according to the interviewees, the civil servants had observed how well-informed parents used the system design unfairly by making strategic choices rather than choices according to their actual preferences:

Civil servant in Solrup: [Previously our system] was set up for making strategic choices, so [parents] made their second choice [a school far away] because then they received their first choice at the expense of others who didn’t understand that they should have made strategic choices.

Politician in Solrup: We would like to allow [parents] to make a priority list of their school choices, but when I was made aware of how it actually works, that doesn’t work. We can’t have [parents] make tactical choices at the expense of someone else, so then we had to make a change.

Above, we see how active parents, in their role as well-informed customers, are acting in an unintended way from a system design point of view, leading to manipulation of the system and its intended use. The key to be able to manipulate the system is to have the right information, which is not something that all parents have (Abdulkadiroğlu & Sönmez, 2003; Kessel, 2019; Reay, 2017). Although the municipal representatives said that they would have liked to offer parents several choices, they found that this freedom was misused by active parents at the expense of inactive ones. The solution in Solrup was the politically determined modification of the system to allow only one choice of school. The interviewed civil servant concluded that this system modification “feels as close to rule of law as it can be”. The system needed to be modified to prevent intentional misuse by the well-informed in a way not intended by the system designers.

In Ekstad, the civil servant addressed a different problem with informed parents who, through their actions, trouble the intended system setup. When their children have already been accepted by private schools, the parents do not then actively decline to make a school choice in the municipality. This is only troubling from the municipality’s point of view and not for those parents who ignore this administrative procedure. The act of not actively declining the school choice arranged by the municipality causes practical trouble for the civil servants and local schools, as the children occupy places in municipal schools that they are not going to attend:

Interviewer: What about parents’ active school choice, are most of them actively choosing or do you have a strategy to persuade more of them to make an active choice?

Civil servant in Ekstad: Yes, we remind them [i.e., parents] throughout the school choice process, in some cases we ask the preschools … we ask principals and teachers, who know the parents, if they know that they haven’t made a choice, so that we get as a good a picture as possible [of the parents’ priorities]. The problem is with the parents who know that “yes, my child is going to the Montessori school anyhow, so I don’t need to bother making a school choice”. We can’t know this, so we need to place them [in a school] anyway if they haven’t actively declined to make a school choice.

What appears above is a different type of trouble caused by parent-customers who make irregular choices: they choose a school for their child but do so outside or parallel to the municipality’s school choice system. To sum up, parents can create trouble in several ways, when they are either active or inactive in relation to the school choice system. As the above analysis reveals, the processes of forming customers on school choice markets is not straightforward, as the customers interact with or ignore the system in ways not intended by its designers.

Discussion

This study’s empirical focus is on local politicians and civil servants’ perception of information and language directed towards parents in the case of local school choice. The study uses the theoretical concept of “customerification processes” (Karlsson, 2020) that signifies a shift in official language, information, and power regarding the use of common resources distributed by the state. Karlsson suggests that these processes take place in and through three contexts: a voucher system where citizens experience themselves as actors on a market; in information provided by the state to the citizens, and in the language the state uses to address the citizens. The present empirical study of civil servants and local politicians in two Swedish municipalities identifies how parents as citizens trouble these customerification processes in different ways: Parents who are either obliged to make a choice for the sake of their child (as in the case of Solrup) or invited to make a choice if they wish (as in the case of Ekstad) troubled the civil servants and the local school choice systems by both being perceived as passive and (too) active.

Four types of troubling parents are identified through the analysis as emerging thought these particular customerification processes: (1) The passive, who creates extensive work for the civil servants during the school choice period (as civil servants say that they are trying many ways of enrolling them to make active choices), (2) The wrongly informed, who believes that their children automatically get a place in the nearest school (resulting in troubles for the civil servants after the school choice period when complaints and questions are addressed to the municipalities), (3) The hyper-consumer, who, based on extensive information consciously manipulates the system in an unfair way that affects others negatively, and (4) The opt-out, who fail to communicate their child’s charter school allocation to the municipality (creating extensive work for the civil servants as their children take up unnecessary place in the public school). While Karlsson (2020, p. 100) argues that customerification processes means that “individuals start viewing themselves as customers rather than citizens in relation to the public sector”, this study indicates that such processes are far from straight forward and causes a lot of work to be realized.

On the one hand, parents acting as informed consumers aligns with the customer role, e.g., by optimizing their own child’s school choice. On the other hand, these actions tend to trouble the intended system design and the wider goal of organizing education in each municipality. While Karlsson (2020, p. 104) argues that “a strong customerification process leads to a collective regression relative to the individual” the interviewees express that the attempts to have parents making active school choices raises dilemmas regarding fairness through the school allocation processes. The Swedish school system is now considered one of the most market oriented in the world, and the interviewees account for different conflicting educational goals integral to the current system design. As such, the interviewees express the issue of education and public and/or private good as a dilemma that manifests itself through the system designs: The interviewees’ experiences of the two different school choice systems highlight, for example, how those parents with little access to information about how the system works have their children placed in leftover schools after those with information have received their preferred school allocation. This result corresponds with what previous studies in the field have concluded about the effects of school choice (e.g., Ball & Vincent, 1998; Bunar & Ambrose, 2018; Gustavsson, 2022; Muench et al., 2022; Reay, 2017).

Conclusions

The aim of this paper was to analyze how representatives of Swedish municipalities conceptualize their role and responsibility in relation to the role of parents in school choice systems. This study focused on understanding how representatives of Swedish municipalities conceptualize the role of parents in school choice systems with the help of Karlsson’s (2020) notion of “customerification processes”. This notion pinpoints that citizens do not just suddenly become customers, but that customers are formed through the practices that make up local school choice. These customerification processes require practical work, and this work needs to be investigated empirically. When studying the conceptualization of customers as users of school choice systems, it becomes evident that the formation of customers is far from straightforward. As the analysis above shows, there are several ways in which parents manage to trouble the school choice system and interact with it in ways not intended by the system designers. This trouble is created, from the perspective of the municipal representatives, both by parents who passively go along with the local school choice system and by parents who actively engage with the system. From the municipalities’ perspective, different parents engage differently with the system by being unruly in their role as customers in school choice systems. However, it is important to point out that the trouble caused by the parents can hardly be seen as intentional, but rather a result of the system design and the different contradictory values it needs to handle.

School choice entails, perhaps like no other educational phenomenon, the quandary over whether education should be considered primarily a public or private good. In recent decades, the conceptualization of education as a private good has strengthened (Labaree, 1997; Lubienski, 2003). The consequences of this development are increasingly questioned in the political debate (Gustavsson, 2022), for example, concerning how this development has contributed to segregation and inequality in the educational system (Böhlmark et al., 2015; Trumberg & Urban, 2020). Moreover, the past 30 years of decentralization in Sweden and globally, which has occurred in both education and in public administration more widely, has shifted the focus to the policy output of public administration (Hall, 2012; Lundahl et al., 2013; Wiborg, 2015). Parents seem increasingly expected to engage as choosers of schools, but not as citizens that forms the organizational conditions for schools.

Wilson (2008, p. 9) argues that the notion of public and private are always relative to each other and cannot be understood as separate terms, which indicates that researchers’ should focus on “how education fulfills and balances both private and public aims”. It is therefore vital to investigate how, in practice, “combined elements of choice and diversity with uniformity” (Levin, 1987, p. 631) are handled by those who organize education. The phenomenon of school choice can be regarded as part of the global educational shift towards a focus on individual rights, and municipalities in Sweden have a significant responsibility to interpret how school choice should be organized locally. The small-scale study presented here displays some aspects of how this is done in practice, and some of the dilemmas that emerge from it. One finding of this study concerns the extensive responsibility and influence civil servants seem to have when it comes to designing the system and reporting potential problems with the system to politicians.

This paper presents conclusions from a small-scale study based on a limited sample of two average-sized municipalities in Sweden. Although this study cannot be used to draw wider conclusions about how school choice systems are designed and how representatives of municipalities conceptualize the role of parents in such systems, the two sampled municipalities have important differences (i.e., in political majority and primary school choice criteria) and important similarities (i.e., their populations are both close to the average size for municipalities, each has one private school, and both are located in the same region), revealing complex conceptualizations of how educational policy is formed through different practices. Preferably, more studies should follow up on how these customerification processes form and are formed by the different actors who both affect and are affected by the school choice policy. More extensive studies are needed to examine the role of civil servants in handling the delicate yet highly important tension between public and private goods.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Sara Carlbaum for her comments on this paper for and her invaluable support of this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Montessori school classes have existed in Sweden since the 1920s (Skjöld Wennerström et al., 2009). As such, they excited long before the reforms in 1990s which opened for independent schools and school markets.