You have heard this from me before, and you’ll hear it again. People who are in charge of public schools are placed there to lead them. They are there to help them get better. They are appointed or elected to solve problems, not to abandon public schools.
When they take charge, they are supposed to be (in Phillip Schlecty’s term), moral and intellectual leaders of the public schools.
They are not appointed or elected to hand off their responsibility to the private sector. That is not leadership. That is an abandonment of responsibility. That is a clear indicator of leaders who lack the knowledge to improve schools and who lack the moral sense required of those in public office.
Yet this is the plan for Camden, New Jersey. Ten schools will close now, undoubtedly more later. The New Jersey Department of Education has a plan prepared by one of its Broad-trained administrators (as the article cited below mentions, the Broad people have colonized the NJ DOE). Since the Broad Foundation is known for training people to privatize public schools and put school systems into bankruptcy, the plan should not surprise. Yet it does. It rings with the business-type phrases that are supposed to assure the public that the writer knows what he is talking about. In fact, what the document shows is a Department of Education that does not know how to help public schools, that doesn’t believe in helping public schools. It shows leaders who are clueless about education. The plan begins by saying that asking how to improve the schools is the wrong question. That’s old-style thinking. The new way of thinking is to hand the public schools over to private management; surely, they must know how to get those test scores up. If they don’t, the schools can always be closed again and turned over to someone else.
This is what is known today as school reform.
http://www.courierpostonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2012305010023
http://www.courierpostonline.com/assets/pdf/BZ18861851.PDF
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Your last paragraph is probably the most succinct statement of so-called school “reform” logic that I have yet seen, and it hits the nail precisely on the head. It starts with the presumption that “government” cannot every do anything well or efficiently. (It conveniently glides over the part about “government of, by and for the people.) Add unions to government and you have an unmitigated disaster. Follow with the unquestioned assertion that the private market will always be efficient, and the natural conclusion is to put publicly-funded schools into the hands of private management.
It’s not just, or even mostly, about profits. It’s based on the ideological foundation that government is never more that a way for “unworthy” special interests to capture taxation power. (In the current public discourse, an observer could be forgiven for thinking that public education was started in the 1960s as a government jobs program.) If a private firm makes a profit managing a school, rather than being scandalized, we are supposed to applaud them, because it means they are doing it right – that they are “worthy.”
We are abrogating our common commitment to provide every child with a quality education. The drumbeat for educational “choice” is conspicuously missing any effort to ensure that the option of local, community-governed public schools are an excellent option. Instead, that should be our first duty. The fight isn’t really about “reform” policies, or even really about education. The fight is about ideas and the basic meaning of living in a community and functioning in a democratic society.