School Commercialism: High Costs, Low Revenues - This report highlights key examples of school districts’ advertising programs that call into question claims by advocates of school commercialism that its potential to generate a lucrative alternative revenue stream is worth the drawbacks school advertising may create. (Public Citizen, 2012)...

Educational Cost of Schoolhouse Commercialism - This is the 14th annual report on trends of schoolhouse commercialism. This year's report considers three types of educational harm associates with marketing in schools. The most obvious is that vending machines in schools encourage children to buy and eat the foods which their teachers try hard to teach them to avoid. (Alex Molnar and Faith Boninger, National Education Policy Center, November 2011)...

Paying for Scale: Results of a Symposium on CMO Finance - In April 2010, a group of researchers and financial analysts met to decide how to better understand the financing and sustainability of CMOs. The report that came out of the meeting offers this conclusion: While public policy plays an important role in the future of CMOs, they cannot wait for legislative solutions. CMOs need to find new ways to help schools operate more efficiently, save money, innovate with new technologies, and adapt to leaner times. (National Charter School Research Project, January 2011)...

Profiles of Nonprofit Education Management Organizations: 2009-2010 - This is the third profiles report to examine nonprofit education management organizations (EMOs). The report is modeled after the annual reports that cover for-profit EMOs. Since the previous year alone, the number of nonprofit EMOs has increased by 2.2%, the number of schools operated by nonprofit EMOs increased by 10.0% and the number of students enrolled in these schools increased 22.2%. (Gary Miron and Jessica Urschel, National Education Policy Center, December 2010)...

Shifting Risk to Create Opportunity: A Role for Performance Guarantees in Education - The authors suggest that while many school districts are hesitant to hand over schools and school functions to outsiders, the Obama administration's goal of reforming 5,000 of the nation's lowest-performing schools in the next five years would benefit from the services of independent educational entrepreneurs. Performance guarantees, they argue, would establish a standard of performance and provide financial compensation for failed promises – and, most importantly, make someone other than the state or district at least partially responsible for outcomes. (Bryan Hassel and Daniela Doyle, American Enterprise Institute, July 2010)...

Characteristics of Private Schools in the United States: Results from the 2007-08 Private School Universe Survey - This report of the 2007-08 Private School Universe Survey presents data on private schools in the United States for grades kindergarten through 12 by selected characteristics such as school size, school level, religious orientation, geographic region, urbanicity type and program emphasis. (National Center for Education Statistics, March 19, 2009)...

State Takeover, School Restructuring, Private Management, and Student Achievement in Philadelphia - In response to decade of budget crisis and years of low achievement, in 2002 the state of Pennsylvania made sweeping education changes when it took over the School District of Philadelphia. It replaced the school board, laid down district-wide curricula and turned over control of 45 schools to profit and non-profit management organizations, as well as making other changes. Now participating in the nation’s largest experiment in private education management, Philadelphia’s schools are analyzed here for comparative student achievement and institution financial success. (Brian Gill, Ron Zimmer, Jolley Christman and Suzanne Blanc, RAND, 2007)...