The Phantom Menace
by Frederick M. Hess • Dec 15, 2011 at 8:28 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
 Print |  Send |  RSS |
ShareWhen it comes to the question of for-profits and American education, there's often more hysteria than analysis. Just this weekend, the New York Times published an extensive, shall we say, selectively sourced attack of for-profit venture K12 Inc. piling atop a similar piece a few weeks back by the Washington Post and other "the profiteers are coming!" exercises in The Nation and elsewhere. To engage in a bit of poetic license, when they look at for-profits, these journalists (and the experts that they quote) see Darth Vader.
Sure, there are valid and sensible concerns about the role of for-profits in schooling. But aggressively recruiting clients and cutting corners to make a buck is the flip side of the things that for-profits are uniquely positioned to do well--which is to squeeze cost structures, find new efficiencies, and rapidly scale. Whether for-profits do these things constructively or not is more about the rules and the marketplace than anything else. Consequently, when I see for-profits, I see not Darth Vader but the young Anakin Skywalker--a still-developing