While the highly emotional and philosophical debate over the place of private schools and charter schools in public education continues to generate incredible amounts of attention, the steadily increasing role of private (for-profit) companies in public K-12 education has gone largely unnoticed.  After researching this relatively unreported trend, Reuters correspondent Stephanie Simon took an in depth look at it in her article Private Firms Eyeing Profits From Public Schools.  Ms. Simon began her article by talking about a recent meeting in Manhattan where about 100 investors and venture capitalists were listening to a presentation about the potential profits to be earned by entering the education services business.  Not surprisingly, the amount of money to be made from the education related areas of our economy is massive since the United States spends “more than $500 billion a year educating kids ages five through 18.”  She then followed this astounding number with the fact that investments in education related businesses by venture capitalists have risen by nearly 3,000% since 2005 to around $389,000,000 per year.  This rapid rise in the number of investments in private education companies is made even more incredible because of the fact that even though the money has always been there, “public education has [historically] been a tough market for private firms to break into — fraught with politics, tangled in bureaucracy and fragmented into tens of thousands of individual schools and school districts from coast to coast.”  After finishing her outline of the general financial motivations covering why private companies have started to enter the K-12 education business in record numbers, Ms. Simon then began to look at what this trend would mean for the individual students, educators, and schools…

-To see supporter and critic analysis of this new trend, check out part 2 right here.

-To look at other posts on a wide variety of topics related to K-12 education click here.

(Originally posted on Friday,  08/17/2012)