I have an incredible investment opportunity for you in the $800 Billion/year industry of compulsory education. There’s an easy 4-step business plan:
1. Tie Public School funding to performance and local economic conditions.
2. Blame underperformance on Evil Government.
3. ?????
4. Profit, even if you’re a Non-Profit!
Step one gets the ball rolling. We have to apply the free market standard of success and reward to the education system. The better you do, the more money you get (just like with CEO pay). If your school isn’t performing well, then you clearly don’t deserve the money you’re getting because you are inefficient. So we’ll move money from the underperforming schools to the schools that perform well. This is partially done though a regressive tax system that funds public schools at a level proportional to the property values. Given that one of the key predictors of academic performance is socio-economic background, part of this job is already done for us.
Step 2 provides an enemy to distract genuinely concerned people from fixing the actual problems. If they fixed the problem in the public system, there would be no room for a private, for-profit solution. Since we all know that no problem can be fixed without making a profit, we shouldn’t have to worry too much about this step. Much of the work has already been done to associate the government with bureaucracy and bureaucracy with incompetence, largely thanks to installing anti-government people in government. It’s really an inside-out kind of approach. Once people believe that government has no answers (because it’s been crippled from the inside) we have the perfect opportunity to extract profit.
The magic is really in Step 3: Create a private company that takes public money to do the same thing as an existing public school, but for less money. The difference between how much you charge and how much you spend is where the profit in Step 4 comes from! By doing the same job as a public school, spending less, and pocketing the difference, we’re adding bonus free-market model lessons.
Income comes from tax revenues, but we save (and pocket) money by not having to be accountable to the public. When this happens in government, it’s called corruption. But when this happens in privatized industries, it’s called profit. Which would you rather have? Corruption or Profit? People will choose profit (See Step 2).
Part of sustaining Step 3 involves looking good on paper. If we don’t show some good numbers, then we won’t get our monthly checks. How do we do this with less money than a public school? Simple: We change the focus from trying to educate everyone to educating only the children who will produce high test scores! What business would hire a slow worker when they could just as easily hire a faster worker? It’s all about efficiency. It’s inefficient to try to educate some children. The beauty of this plan is that refusing to admit underperforming kids and concentrating them in the failing public schools further reinforces the impetus in Step 1, making our system all the more necessary!
Finally, we come to Step 4: Profit. Clearly, by taking the efficiencies gained in not educating all students, but only the ones that cost less to educate, we can achieve higher test scores using less money, and pocket the difference! Ideally, we’d convince governments to let us have for-profit, even publicly-traded corporations, like New York City’s Edison Schools (NASDAQ: EDSN) formerly was.
But even if the public isn’t quite ready to accept the idea of using compulsory education for private profit, you can still make money as a “non”-profit. Look to the “non”-profit Celerity as an example. In Los Angeles, they contract out their management (and really, isn’t that the most important, differentiating feature?) to a for-profit called Nova. It just so happens that if you own both Nova and Celerity, you can charge yourself plenty in order to make a profit.
You may be asking yourself, “I’d love to invest, but I’d like to see this in action.” Fortunately, you can! Take a look at New Orleans for example. Before God sent Hurricane Katrina to punish the gays and poor people, there were 123 public schools in the city. Afterward, profiteers were able, through state intervention, turn over most of them to subcontractors! The top-performing students now go to publicly funded privately controlled schools, while the public schools are left with fewer resources and some even have student to teacher ratios of 40:1. Guess which students are doing better? (See Step 1).
You might ask: “What about the teachers and the teacher unions in New Orleans?” Well, the clever state of New Orleans fired them all and forced them to re-apply for their jobs. Plus, $40 Million in state money was moved from public to private schools and some public schools weren’t even reopened despite parents, teachers, and students all waiting to get started. This means that there are wait-lists for students who want to go to public schools. Finally, government working on behalf of business instead of poor people!
If you’re interested, send me a check and I’ll purchase shares of EDSN on your behalf.
This just in: Due to EDSN shares plummeting to $0.14/share on news of only one profitable quarter and the SEC investigation into cooked books, Edison Schools is no longer publicly traded. For investment opportunities, please contact Jeb Bush who, on behalf of the Florida Retirement Fund, provided money for a bailout to take Edison Schools private again. Edison has since diversified into marketing test-taking supplies and summer school services.
Ahhhh… is there anything more beautiful than using public money to enrich private industries? Thomas Jefferson would be proud!
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