Private firms eyeing profits from U.S. public schools | Reuters

Interim superintendent and chronic education reformer Paul Vallas said at the 6/25 Bridgeport BOE meeting that anyone who thinks they will make money in education is crazy.  Apparently there are some crazy people out there.

Private firms eyeing profits from U.S. public schools | Reuters: "The K-12 market is tantalizingly huge: The U.S. spends more than $500 billion a year to educate kids from ages five through 18. The entire education sector, including college and mid-career training, represents nearly 9 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, more than the energy or technology sectors.

Traditionally, public education has been a tough market for private firms to break into -- fraught with politics, tangled in bureaucracy and fragmented into tens of thousands of individual schools and school districts from coast to coast.

Now investors are signaling optimism that a golden moment has arrived. They're pouring private equity and venture capital into scores of companies that aim to profit by taking over broad swaths of public education.

The conference last week at the University Club, billed as a how-to on "private equity investing in for-profit education companies," drew a full house of about 100."

'via Blog this'