Summary: One of Choice Media's best Ed Reform Minute Podcasts of 2013.For several years, the education establishment has seized on the term "For-Profit" as shorthand for greed-driven and resource-starved. But now, a backlash develops.In education the bashing of "for profit" as a concept is usually offered as so obviously true, it simply doesn't need explaining. If schools are for-profit, operators will have the prime directive of enriching themselves, and so they'll hoard the resources desperately needed by students to instead line their pockets. Insert imagery of old men greedily rubbing their hands together with beady-eyed, Ebenezer Scrooge-like, sniveling, rapacious anticipation.The most recent serving of anti-for-profit narrative was in a Washington Post blog of May 20, by David Pickler, President of the National School Boards Association, titled "What's wrong with school 'choice"? Here's what." (Choice was put in quotation marks.) He referred to Louisiana's voucher law as "driven primarily by outside forces that want to make big profits on the backs of our nation's most vulnerable children." Sounds bad, eh? It was enough to set off Jason Bedrick of the Cato Institute, who published a response the very next day, using a parallel interrogative title structure. His piece was called, "Who's Afraid of School Profits?"Bedrock pointed out that most of the private schools taking Louisiana vouchers are, in fact, non-profit. Then he goes on to explain in the piece how selectively people like Pickler apply their "money is corrupting" logic. Jason Bedrick explained it to me too.Oh, "outside forces want to make big profits on the backs of our nation's most vulnerable children." Which is just patently absurd. Nobody says, "That business, they're making a profit on the backs of their paying customers." It doesn't make any sense at all. When you think about it, really, these are schools that these families have chosen. Who's really benefiting on the backs of these vulnerable children? I would say it's the people that are fighting to continue to public school monopoly.Meanwhile, the disparagement of for-profit education is de rigueur among the education establishment, if you'll excuse my French. Most of the people decrying for-profit schools don't say they're oppose for-profit everywhere. In other words, they don't usually present themselves as anti-capitalist, anti-free enterprise, socialist/communists. That, after all, would be a clearer debate. Instead, most of them just don't address the disconnect. And by disconnect, I mean that at the very moment they're typing their disdain of for-profit schools, they're carrying a for-profit created iPhone or Android on their person that they love, owning a for-profit made car that they think is wonderful, and planning to go eat at a favorite for-profit restaurant that they're happy to recommend.They have been allowed to avoid the thinner conceptual ice of why education is so different -- a particular, special area where the profit motive ruins service -- because there has been almost no pushback . No one has asked them why the profit motive of FedEx, or UPS, somehow doesn't ruin them in competition with the Post Office, the way they the same concept of profits will allegedly undermine a different service called education.A blog entry this month from one Christine Noble is an example.She writes, "For profit operations are just that: for profit. Their end goal will not be the education of our children, but the increasing of their bottom line."She goes on to further paint her distopian portrait, "You will see gigantic class sizes. You will see parents needing to buy resources like books. You will see less, possibly no, extra curricular activity."She concludes, "The nature of the profit beast is simple, you must raise prices and/or reduce costs…. It is a price the privateers have us convinced we should pay. (And yeah, I think comparing them to pirates is fair.
