#Busing #led #results #students #years
In 2017, a medium-sized Swedish municipality, which will not be named for research ethical reasons, decided to close a primary school in a vulnerable million program area.
Instead, the municipality wanted to give the children a ride to two other schools that were about three kilometers away – in areas where there were villas and a more mixed settlement.
There were more students from studious middle-class families with a Swedish background.
The purpose was to counteract school segregation and get the results for the children who came from the socio-economically vulnerable area.
If they had study-motivated classmates, their results would improve on the national tests in Swedish and Swedish as a second language in grade three, the idea was.
In the study, researchers at Stockholm University followed the effects of busing for a school in a medium-sized Swedish municipality. Photo: Sören Andersson
In the first year, the results went down in both groups. Teachers and school leaders explained that it was so much new for the students who started third grade in a new school.
– Everything was completely new, everyone had to learn to ride the bus. Some did not tolerate others and it was a huge job to get the group together. And in the middle of all this, they would write national exams, says a teacher who was involved in the project and is quoted in the study.
But when the first litter of children finished third, the teacher wanted revenge.
– Then I knew I had three years to build this and thought, now the hell we’re going to put this in place, says the teacher.
The bushing was combined with deliberate pedagogical efforts, for example a two-teacher system where students were kept in the same class and where they were encouraged to wait and help each other so that everyone moved forward at the same time.
The teachers also worked to create an inclusive school culture. For example, they had table placement at lunch so that the students rotated and sat with each other. They also introduced a “friend of the week” system, which meant that the children played with more than their usual friends.
In Swedish and Swedish as a second language, the results were worse in the first year. After that, the results started to turn upwards considerably. Both for students with Swedish as their mother tongue and for those who studied Swedish as a second language.
The fact that the children were young was important because play helps to counteract segregation, according to the study. Photo: Janerik Henriksson/TT
– After a while, we saw very clearly that it benefited above all the students who had a minority background, says Stefan Lund, professor of pedagogy at Stockholm University and project manager for the study.
In 2017, only 50 percent of third-graders passed all subtests in Swedish as a second language. Four years later, in 2021, the percentage was 74 percent, which is an increase of 24 percentage points.
It is also higher than the national average of 63 percent.
Even for the third-graders who read Swedish, the results rose sharply. In 2017, the percentage who passed all sub-exams was 86 percent. Four years later, the percentage had increased to 96 percent, which is a good deal higher than the national average of 88 percent.
The children also made more friends with different backgrounds. 70 percent of the third graders answered that they had at least one classmate in the classroom with whom they thought they worked best but who did not belong to the same student group as themselves.
Time and commitment are crucial for whether controlled school integration such as busing is to work, according to Stefan Lund.
It is also important that the children are young, he believes.
– The younger the students are, the more the game has to do with integration. This means that it does not matter so much if they lack language skills. They manage to play with each other anyway, he says.
Without good school management and teachers, it is not certain that the busing would have had the same effect, says Professor Stefan Lund. Photo: Stig Hammarstedt
When they are in junior high school, efforts such as “friend of the week” or rotating places in the dining hall would not work because older children attach more importance to language skills and how they talk to each other, says Stefan Lund.
It is not enough to just create ethnically and socio-economically mixed student groups for what is known as peer effects to occur.
Teachers and school leaders must also have a strong ambition to create new ways of working as an inclusive school culture, points out Stefan Lund.
– It would never have worked if the teaching team did not believe so strongly in a school for everyone, and at the same time had an ability to handle the changed student composition.
The working method of keeping a class together, despite big differences, also created frustration for some students who had progressed further in their language and subject development.
But their results also improved, according to Stefan Lund. Although they might find the cohesiveness of the class and the repetitions made the lessons boring.
One method used to reduce their impatience was to have them help the students who were lagging behind.
Fact. Busing led to better results
● A medium-sized municipality decided to close a primary and secondary school in a million program area and transfer students who attended there to a school in a more mixed area.
● In order to stimulate language and knowledge development, the teaching was laid out according to a clear pedagogical structure, adapted to the changed situation.
● The results of the study show that the majority of students got, two years after the reform was implemented, higher results on the national tests in Swedish and Swedish as a second language compared to before and in the years immediately after the reform.
● They also socialized during school time to a greater extent with students who had a different ethnic background than themselves.
● The pedagogues’ work with an inclusive school culture and a language-active approach was crucial for the controlled school integration to succeed, according to the study.
● The children’s young age was also important.
Source: University of Stockholm
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