Opened one year ago, the Áslandsskóli school was the first neighborhood school in the country to be run by a private organization--the Icelandic Educational Society (IMS). The May 2001 contract between municipal authorities and this "nonprofit" body stipulated that the town would pay the school’s running expenses, while IMS would finance its construction and be responsible for organizing teaching according to its so-called progressive ideology.

This contract was widely presented by capitalist politicians and the big-business media as a model for cost-cutting in the education system. An editorial that appeared in the January 31 issue of Morgunblaðið, the country’s main bourgeois daily, stated, "This method has been disputed, but there are strong arguments that show that in this way the advantages of private initiative can be utilized to find the most efficient way and keep down the cost of projects for which the public authorities are legally responsible."

The school became one of the main issues in local elections held in May. In Hafnarfjörður the social democratic Socialist Alliance promised to buy out the company’s contract and take over the running of the school. For its part, the conservative Independence Party, the principal bourgeois party in Iceland for decades, held Áslandsskóli up as an example for other schools across Iceland.

Guðrún Pétursdóttir, an Independence Party member of the Reykjavík city council, wrote March 9 in Morgunblaðið that "the city of Reykjavík should follow its neighbors in Hafnarfjörður. They have shown the farsightedness of having a school built as a private venture, which has indisputable advantages."

In spite of such appeals the Socialist Alliance won the Hafnarfjörður elections, while the Progressive Party, the IP’s coalition partner in the harbor town, lost their only seat in the town council.

On September 11, around 13 of the 16 teachers at Áslandsskóli presented a set of demands to IMS management, insisting on an answer by the following day. They demanded a clear definition of their tasks, that the schedule not change over the winter, that classes not have mixed ages and that resolutions of the school committee on maximum class sizes be adhered to.

Teacher Ástríður Einarsdóttir explained these demands in an interview with the Militant. "It takes more time and energy to prepare and teach classes with children of different ages, and often between 24 and 28 children in each class. Since the schedule wasn’t clear and we didn’t have the necessary teaching materials, we were doing a lot of running about and last-minute patch-ups. Having no support teachers for children with learning or other disabilities only made things worse."

The teachers demanded that support teaching be provided for, as it is in other schools in Iceland. "IMS management said there was no need for this, since Icelandic and math classes were divided according to ability," Einarsdóttir said, "but support teaching is about more than that."

After a September 12 meeting between the teachers and bosses produced no results, 11 teachers resigned. "We saw that there was no basis for negotiating," said Einarsdóttir. "They either tried to make the problems seem small or to justify them." After the company failed to give the teachers a formal reply, two more quit.

Two days later, the mayor of Hafnarfjörður announced that the town authorities would revoke their contract with the IMS and take over the school. At first the IMS protested, saying that the proposed action was illegal. After a week of negotiations, however, they reached an agreement that gave them 45 million Icelandic kronur ($500,000) in exchange for the town authorities’ takeover of all school facilities, contracts, administration, and organization. IMS still runs a day-care center in the same area.

The failure of this experiment has been a blow to the efforts of the Icelandic rulers to find ways to implement cost-cutting and introduce variety--a code-word for greater inequality and differentiation along class lines in the education system. Morgunblaðið editorialized on September 20, "The experiment’s drawback was that it was done in a neighborhood school, where parents really don’t have a choice whether to send their children or not.... Those who are interested in strengthening private initiative and variety in Iceland’s schools by encouraging private concerns to run schools should not let the failure in Áslandsskóli get to them."  
 
 
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