More than 300 private organizations—both for-profit and nonprofit—are running public school programs across the country, according to a new tally from Western Michigan University researchers.
The study finds that the 2010-11 school year was one of slow growth for for-profit education groups and steady growth in the nonprofit sector.
It also estimates that private groups operate 35 percent of the nation’s public charter schools, and those schools enroll more than 778,000 students.
Researchers found that schools run by nonprofit education managers were more successful than their for-profit counterparts at meeting state requirements for adequate yearly progress under the federal No Child Left Behind law. In the former group, 56.4 percent of schools met that benchmark, compared with 48.2 percent of schools run by for-profit groups.
The report was released by the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and includes profiles of the nearly 300 education management organizations.
