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This report provides a first-of-its-kind descriptive summary of private school expenditures. It includes comparisons of expenditures among different types and affiliations of private schools, and it also compares those expenditures with public school expenditures for districts in the same state and labor market. Results indicate that (1) the less-regulated private school sector is more varied in many key features (teacher attributes, pay and school expenditures) than the more highly regulated public schooling sector; (2) these private school variations align and are largely explained by affiliation -- primarily religious affiliation -- alone; and (3) a ranking of school sectors by average spending correlates well with a ranking of those sectors by average standardized test scores.

What is the responsibility of the state to the education of its children. What should it do in response to continued failure? The debate about privatization-about charters and vouchers and increased aid to private schools-really is a consequence of the failure of what was one thought to be the ultimate school reform: The state takeover of failing schools. One panelist, Michelle Fine of Montclair, an author and professor at City University of New York, called privatization "just an exit ramp for some people.'' Because charters and other forms of privatization don't take in all children, she said, they "cannot be considered a systematic, equitable strategy'' for reform. Just a way to help some children.

"Public schools achieve the same or better mathematics results as private schools with demographically similar students, concludes The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools, published in November by the University of Chicago Press. The authors are Christopher and Sarah Lubienski, a husband-and-wife team of education professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Central to the controversy is their suggestion that vouchers, which provide public funding for private school tuition, are based on the premise that private schools do better-an assumption that is undercut by the book's overall findings."

"Some people, not surprisingly, weren't thrilled with my post titled "Welfare for the rich? Private school tax credit programs expanding." Here Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center, housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education, looks at the criticism and gives us a primer on private school tax credit programs, which he calls "neovouchers." He's the author of the 2008 book "NeoVouchers: The Emergence of Tuition Tax Credits for Private Schooling.""

The idea that our education system should serve the needs of the free market and even be run by private interests is not new. "Those parts of education," wrote the economist Adam Smith in his famous 1776 work, The Wealth of Nations, "for the teaching of which there are not public institutions, are generally the best-taught."2 More recently, Milton Friedman introduced the idea of market-driven education in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom. With the economic downturn of the early 1970s, Friedman's ultra-right-wing free-market ideas would become guiding principles for the U.S. government and be forced onto states throughout the world. The push toward privatization and deregulation, two of the key tenets of what is known as neoliberalism, haven't just privatized formerly public services; they have unabashedly channeled public money into private coffers. "Philanthropreneurs,"3 corporations, and ideologues are currently using charter schools to accomplish these goals in education.

This is what privatization looks like. Our public institutions, starved of funds, are desperately kissing up to corporate America. Worse, our expectations are privatized. We're thinking of education as a prize-won by fierce competition or dumb luck-rather than a right. The private money is everywhere. Our neighborhoods continue to be bombarded with charter schools that could not exist without the financial and corporate elites.

In 1981, Chile introduced nationwide school choice by providing vouchers to any student wishing to attend private school. As a result, more than 1000 private schools entered the market, and the private enrollment rate increased by 20 percentage points, with greater impacts in larger, more urban, and wealthier communities. We use this differential impact to measure the effects of unrestricted choice on educational outcomes. Using panel data for about 150 municipalities, we find no evidence that choice improved average educational outcomes as measured by test scores, repetition rates, and years of schooling. However, we find evidence that the voucher program led to increased sorting, as the "best" public school students left for the private sector.

…Directly Publicly Subsidized, Limited Public Access, Publicly or Privately Authorized, Publicly or Privately Governed, Managed and Operated Schools

The question today is whether a democratic society needs public schools subject to democratic governance. Why not turn public dollars over to private corporations to run schools as they see fit? Isn't the private sector better and smarter than the public sector? The rise of charter schools has been nothing short of meteoric. They were first proposed in 1988 by Raymond Budde, a Massachusetts education professor, and Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. Budde dreamed of chartering programs or teams of teachers, not schools. Shanker thought of charters as small schools, staffed by union teachers, created to recruit the toughest-to-educate students and to develop fresh ideas to help their colleagues in the public schools. Their originators saw charters as collaborators, not competitors, with the public schools. Now the charter industry has become a means of privatizing public education. They tout the virtues of competition, not collaboration. The sector has many for-profit corporations, eagerly trolling for new business opportunities and larger enrollments. Some charters skim the top students in the poorest neighborhoods; some accept very small proportions of students who have disabilities or don't speak English; some quietly push out those with low scores or behavior problems (the Indianapolis public schools recently complained about this practice by local charters).

The Philadelphia school system announced in late April that it was on the brink of insolvency and would be turned over to private operators, dissolving most remnants of democratic governance. Specifically, if the city's leaders have their way, 64 of the city's neighbourhood public schools will close over the next five years, and by 2017, 40 per cent of the city's children will attend charter schools. These are are privately run schools that use public funds. Perhaps most disturbingly to those who value democracy and doubt the wisdom of corporate elites, the city will have no oversight of its own school system. Schools will instead be governed by "networks", control of which will be auctioned off through a bidding process, and could be bestowed on anyone - including a CEO of a for-profit education company. The situation in Philadelphia, which has received amazingly little attention from the national media in the US, offers a disturbing window onto what the US elite is planning for the rest of our public schools - disturbing because Philadelphia's experience has already demonstrated that turning public education over to private entities will ultimately lead to its destruction.

The Louisiana "reforms" are intended to encourage pupils to transfer out of public education. There is nothing in them to improve public schools, just to promote alternatives so that students can "escape." The Jindal "reforms" are a template for the Romney education program. Romney, who went to elite private schools and sent his own children to elite private schools,  views public education as a disaster. Given his Bain background, he may see public education as a business that should be shut down, with its component parts sold off. From his perspective, privatization makes sense.

On May 23, the Romney campaign released its education policy white paper titled "A Chance for Every Child: Mitt Romney's Plan for Restoring the Promise of American Education." If you liked the George W. Bush administration's education reforms, you will love the Romney plan. If you think that turning the schools over to the private sector will solve their problems, then his plan will thrill you. The central themes of the Romney plan are a rehash of Republican education ideas from the past thirty years, namely, subsidizing parents who want to send their child to a private or religious school, encouraging the private sector to operate schools, putting commercial banks in charge of the federal student loan program, holding teachers and schools accountable for students' test scores, and lowering entrance requirements for new teachers. These policies reflect the experience of his advisers, who include half a dozen senior officials from the Bush administration and several prominent conservative academics, among them former Secretary of Education Rod Paige and former Deputy Secretary of Education Bill Hansen, and school choice advocates John Chubb and Paul Peterson.

A newly-created state school district, the Educational Achievement System (EAS), will begin in Fall 2012 as part of Gov. Rick Snyder's education reform. At that point, it begins receiving state and federal per-pupil funding. Until then, the new system will operate as the only public district in the nation supported entirely by private donations. A newly-formed business entity, the Michigan Education Excellence Foundation, is collecting private monies for the operation of the Education Achievement Authority (EAA), the board that will oversee and implement the EAS, a statewide district for "low-performing" public schools.

Barack Obama is presiding over the beginning of a process that will inexorably result in the privatization of our school system. That doesn't meant of course that all of our schools will be owned by big corporations; it means instead that within the next five to ten years, our largest school systems will be enmeshed with the private sector, and the regulatory framework that encourages same will be defended vociferously by a new and fierce network of rent seekers. Within a generation, "public schools" will be public only in the sense that they will rely on primarily on government money-similar in that way to the defense industry.

"While reasonable people can disagree about whether this is "privatization," the question remains as to whether the market mechanisms embodied within the charter model lead to more socially just outcomes.  After all, many might be willing to accept privatization if choice and competition produce more equitable and just opportunities, especially for disadvantaged children. However, an increasing consensus in research circles suggests that charter schools may exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, the chronic inequity in America's education system.  Despite its roots as an initiative to promote more equitable outcomes, multiple studies have linked charter programs with segregation. "

"But what does it tell us as parents and citizens when the private "acquisition of 16,905 students" is now intertwined with the provision of "public" education? Public services are different from private services, and the privatization of public education has often-negative consequences for equity, quality, and democracy."

Even amid a surge of pro-voucher laws around the country, a number of educational and political forces are likely to complicate and possibly impede the future growth of private school choice, a leading supporter of those policies predicts in a new essay. Teachers' unions, and Democrats, like the Obama administration, typically are held up as the chief enemies of voucher expansion, writes Chester E. Finn, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which backs private school choice. And their opposition to vouchers is not in doubt. But a number of other complex factors are likely to skew and possibly undermine the private school choice landscape going forward, writes Finn, a former Reagan administration official and widely published author.

Public Education and Private Profit (12:07PM) In six or seven states, kids were asked ridiculous questions on a standardized test. Then, New York's 8th graders were asked about a pineapple that challenges a hare to a race. Since the pineapple can't move, forest animals suspect it has a trick up its sleeve and bet on it to win. But the hare wins and the animals eat the pineapple. The moral is: pineapples don't have sleeves. The story - and the four questions kids were asked about it -- are so obviously stupid that education officials have announced they won't count in official scoring. The resulting ridicule helped fuel the growing backlash against No Child Left Behind and other education "reforms" based on tests devised by private corporations. Parents' and teachers' groups, and some churches, are among those complaining that education is being sacrificed to the profit motive at public expense. What are the consequences for taxpayers and - more important - for students? Guests: Diane Ravitch: New York University, @DianeRavitch Kathleen Porter-Magee: Thomas B. Fordham Institute, @kportermagee Alex Molnar: National Education Policy Center Dru Stevenson: South Texas College of Law

A bill that would offer private and parochial school scholarships to some Newark students would give those children the chance at a bright future that many of their public schools deny them today, Newark Mayor Cory Booker said during a keynote address in Jersey City. Booker spoke to the American Federation for Children, a privately funded group that advocates for school choice in select states across the country. Gov. Chris Christie delivered a keynote address to the group Thursday and also urged passage of the bill, known as the Opportunity Scholarship Act.

Philadelphia's public school system is on the brink of insolvency, and the city has no choice but to dismantle what's left of its public education system and hand over schools to private operators, according to school district leaders. But it turns out the quickest way to bring the wrath of an outraged public raining down on a city is to propose the wholesale privatization of a school district, Philadelphia has found out in recent weeks.