I am a historian of education and I should know these things, but I don’t.
Does anyone know when for-profit schools first began operations?
I am guessing it was Educational Alternatives Inc., in Baltimore, in the early 1990s (where Rhee was a teacher), but I am not certain.
EAI pre-dated the arrival of Edison Schools by a few years. Did anyone pre-date EAI?
Perhaps someone reading this blog has the answer at hand, either from research or from practical experience.
I keep thinking how unusual it is to have schools operating for-profit and how easily we now accept such schools as part of the landscape of “innovations.”
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
aren’t all private schools for-profit? (i suppose parochial would be categorized as non-profit…)
or are you referring to charters that are run by for-profit mgmt groups..?
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No, private and religious schools don’t pay a profit to investors, stockholders, shareholders. Whatever income they have is supposed to be spent on the school, the staff, and the students or set aside in a reserve fund for emergencies. Schools don’t make a profit unless they are owned or managed by for-profit corporations.
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Almost all private schools are actually non-profit organizations but some of them pay their head of school or CEO a ridiculous amount of money.
Diane, I recommend looking into the practices of a group called Cognita. They have been buying up independent schools and turning a tidy profit on the deal.
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I’m not sure if correspondence schools count, but those go way back.
I remember reading somewhere that when the telephone first came into common use it inspired a futuristic craze in education circles, that Fordism and William James were somehow mixed up or swept up in it.
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A correspondence school might count as for-profit, but I don’t know of any that has taken over and managed a public school and received taxpayer dollars for their services.
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For profit teaching has been around for a long time. Long enough that Socrates was offended that he had been charged with accepting money to teach.
“In response to the idea that he took money as a teacher Socrates insisted that the life he led had brought him utter poverty rather than monetary reward. ”
I suspect that if you want to find out when for-profit education started in the United States, you may have to dig back a fair ways.
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Many schools in other countries charge fees for schooling. That’s not “for-profit,” that’s paying for basic expenses to make up for lack of state funding.
In this country in the nineteenth century, there were school fees or tuition. But again, there were no shareholders or investors expecting to turn a profit. The schools were meeting their expenses.
We have something new: corporations, some listed on the New York Stock Exchange, that have stockholders and pay dividends, right out of tax dollars.
I can’t think of anything similar in this country earlier than 1989 or 1990, that is, EAI in Baltimore.
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Re: for profits/ management companies – EAI, I believe in Harlem Park in Baltimore was one of the first for profits to be managed, run and operated by a management firm. It was also where Michelle Rhee performed her magnificent feats of educational brilliance: test scores in the 90th percentile, swatting and eating a bee, and finally the most pathetic, the place where she duct-taped the mouths of students shut.
Too bad she never gave DC teachers any tips on how to boost scores like she did. Some I guess opted to use an eraser.
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For sure your question is about for-profit in the USA, but i can tell you that in Chile there is a voucher system established in 1981 that allows public financing for for-profit schools. That will be more than thirty years….
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A reader comments with this:
According to a 1996 book from the Century Foundation—Hard Lessons: Public Schools and Privatization, by Carol Ascher, Norm Fruchter, and Robert Berne—there were older experiments in privatization:
· For the 1969-1970 school year when a firm, Dorsett Educational Systems, was hired to teach 350 students in Texarkana. The authors describe this as an attempt to contract out. Other efforts at performance contracting are also recounted here, supported in the early 1970s by grants from the Office of Ec0onomic Opportunity… in Colorado, Michigan, Virginia, and California. It adds that others then tried… Gary, Indiana, Flint, Michigan, Portland, Oregon, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And by 1971-1972, there were 150 performance contracts.
· This book also then tells the story of Alum Rock and vouchers, with the idea of vouchers going back to the early 1960s.The Alum Rock, California school district signed up for a voucher experiment of 5-7 years. However, due to CA law at the time, it was a public school experiment. Later in 1973, when CA law changed to permit non-public schools to be part of the program, there were no private schools in Alum rock. The students chose between special program public schools, designed by teachers..
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Was it Texarkana, TX or Arkansas?
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Edison Learning was founded in 1992 as The Edison Project.
National Heritage Academies was founded in Michigan in 1995.
These are the 2 earliest for-profit school management companies that I know of.
Here is a link to the NECP (National Education Policy Center) site.
http://nepc.colorado.edu/
They prepare a yearly report on for-profit educational management companies. The earliest report is for 1998-99:
http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/cerai-98-02.htm
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http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=886
AEI Seems to be the first profit maker and Milton Freidman talked about privatization of public schools in the 1950’s
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I agree about the 1990s. Did the for profits get their big push from George H.W.’s New America’s Schools Corporation grants.
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Sorry, that would be EAI. More on EAI, http://www.lwv.org/content/subcontracting-public-education
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Got out my “Education and the Cult of Efficiency” classic and couldn’t find anything in there but then again it’s from the early sixties.
One to consider is the Kaplans as they started out as a profit making organization but not to take over public schools, although I thought I read somehwere that they are getting into charters-I may be wrong on that though.
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