Those of us who want to see more school choice ought to take interest in how this plays out. For-profit primary and secondary schools are a natural and perhaps desirable consequence of a free market in K-12 education.
So far this phenomenon seems mostly limited to truly elite schools. But lets say for-profit grade schools and high schools want to open up to serve middle-class and even lower-income markets. Should they be licensed differently than parochial schools or other non-profits? Should they qualify for vouchers in states that have them?
For-profit education does have a rather checkered history in this country, at least at the college level. Will competition and the profit motive push for-profit schools to provide a higher-quality education than their non-profit and government competitors? Or will they exist for the purpose of ripping off the government and its students like the University of Phoenix?
The problem is not the pro-profit schools but the bloated government educrats in the Dept of Ed. Get rid of them and all those federal rules and $$ and the system will reset itself...
It is interesting. I often mull over the notion of creating a private high school, that would be affordable to ordinary people. So far I really haven’t come up with a way to make it profitable though- I guess if you want to make a profit, then it has to be a school for the wealthy. Or, maybe you could sell stock... Education doesn’t really fit the business model......
btt