This is not satire. It is real.

In a guest post for EduShyster, a hedge fund manager explains why Wall Street loves charters.

To them, the way to manage schools is to treat them like a stock portfolio. Keep the winners, dump the losers. Report the success of the winners, forget about the losers. It is a great formula.

The CREDO study has been cited as evidence that charters are getting better but the study notes that 8% had closed, thus removing some of the weakest charters.

He or she writes:

“In statistics, this is a textbook case of what is known technically as “survivorship bias”—otherwise known as “ignoring data that makes you look bad.” This statistical fallacy opens up enormous opportunities for people with flexible ethics and an entrepreneurial bent. It is a mainstay of the hedge fund industry, for instance. Hedge fund indices routinely appear to outperform simple, non-fee generating investment strategies like index funds by neglecting to include funds that closed down, and take funds out of the index whenever they stop reporting performance (hint: no fund fails to report good performance!).”

And then adds:

“The parallels to the emerging charter school paradigm are obvious. You start a lot of charters. Some do better than public schools, some do worse, but overall they underperform. You shut down the bad ones. Now repeat the analysis with the non-terrible ones. Improvement! Except that the students unfortunate enough to attend these terrible school don’t just disappear (we hope – let’s not give charter schools any ideas!). However, they do disappear from the CREDO study, and that seems to be good enough for the charter sector and its advocates to proclaim this a success story.”

I wonder if Wall Street will love charters less after the news of their dismal performance on the Common Core tests. What an embarrassment for a guy who wants to be a winner every day, then discovers he has been sitting on the board of a schools that did worse than the neighborhood public school.