The Feds' For-Profit Double Standard in Ed
by Frederick M. Hess • Oct 12, 2011 at 10:03 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
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ShareI'm frequently frustrated by our inability to talk sensibly about the role of for-profits in schooling. Most discussion amounts to reflexive demonization, occasionally interspersed with hired-gun salesmanship or protestations of good intentions. Nearly absent is thinking about the role for-profits can play in promoting quality and cost-effectiveness at scale, or what it'll take to make that happen.
This black-and-white storyline plays out in education, even as other sensitive areas of domestic public policy (like health care or environmental protection) prove far more comfortable with the role that for-profits play. In an invaluable new analysis, John Bailey of Whiteboard Advisors--and veteran of the White House, the U.S. Department of Education, and the U.S. Department of Commerce--examines how the federal government excludes for-profit educational providers even as it welcomes for-profits in a raft of other vital areas (Full
