For-profits—whether in higher education or K-12—have long been one of the biggest flashpoints in the education policy debate. It’s tough to spend any significant amount of time working in education without encountering some pretty strong opinions on the topic.
There are many people on the reform side—even those without a direct financial interest—that tout the presence of for-profits as being either a good thing or, at a minimum, neutral. The argument goes that for-profits add an element of competition that should lift all boats and give students the chance to choose their own path (aka free market principles). They also argue that these companies work harder to find economic efficiencies or innovations that could be applied to all schools (aka profit motivation), and thus can be useful in finding ways to stretch the ever-shrinking education dollar even further.
The flip side of this position is that for-profits are inherently evil. The same profit motivation that one side touts is said by the other to do nothing more than vacuum out money that should be going back into schools. As such, they fail to serve their students’ interests in favor of serving their own.
To be sure, I’ve dumbed down the arguments for and against a great deal for the sake of brevity. But to be fair to myself, they’re both dumb arguments in the first place. Each of these opinions can be valid in certain circumstances, and likewise, they can both be downright idiotic in certain circumstances. That’s because the truth of the issue is that it can, and does in many instances, work both ways.
There are plenty of for-profits that do, in fact, serve their students very well. In Michigan, for example, a February 2013 study showed that public charter schools run by for-profits tended to perform better or equal to their non-profit peers. The opposite can be observed in New Jersey, where Education Commissioner Chris Cerf drew both praise and criticism for his decision to deny a charter to K12—a for-profit, online education provider—but questions have arisen nonetheless about the cost and quality of services that K12 provides to a charter school in Newark.
So what’s the real problem here? In a nutshell, it’s laziness. On one extreme, people scream bloody murder when traditional public schools are shut down for failing students while calling for a bloodletting of for-profits in education. On the other extreme, people cheer for the closure of failing traditional public schools while defending failing for-profits to the ends of the earth. Neither is a particularly clever policy position and each is utterly indefensible from any rational point of view. But it is really easy (and maybe even cathartic) to grunt “non-profit good, for-profit bad!” or “free markets forever!” without placing more than a second’s thought into it.
At least their consistency in message can be pretty admirable, if not intelligent. But their arguments are incredibly at odds with what is allegedly their bigger picture objective: doing what’s best for our kids. The only thing that should matter here is whether or not students are being provided an excellent education, regardless of the vehicle it takes to give it to them.
The only meaningful solution to the dilemma posed by for-profits—or any other kind of school—is accountability that is meaningful, objective, and applicable to ALL actors, regardless of where the money goes. No school that fails its students should operate with impunity. No school that does an admirable job of raising student achievement should be punished.
A well-structured accountability system—founded on rigorous standards and measured by adaptive assessments that reward actual learning rather than memorization—can do what’s necessary in identifying the good actors and the bad. We merely have to have the fortitude and the political will to act upon what it tells us, regardless of how the school is managed or where the money goes. If we’re consistent in doing that, the for-profit vs. non-profit battle would either quickly melt away or expose itself for what it is: a battle over money, not what’s best for students.
Domenic Giandomenico joined Democrats for Education Reform in 2013 after devoting more than a decade of his career to ensuring that every student of every age, background, and aspiration has access to the excellent education they deserve.