Alex Molnar, Glen Wilson, Melissa Restori and John Hutchison, Education Policy Studies Laboratory, Arizona State University
January 17, 2002
This is another report on the same subject: a directory of EMOs and the schools they operate. Published by Arizona State University's Education Policy Studies Laboratory, it profiles 36 companies that manage 368 schools. (CER reports on 19 companies and claims "about 350" schools. Much of the difference is due to CER focusing on national firms while the Arizona team includes a bunch of tiny one- and two-school companies, mainly in Arizona, where for-profit firms can hold charters directly.) The team leader and chief assembler is Alex Molnar, a longtime critic of the profit motive in K-12 education, but this lengthy document confines its critical comments to the opening pages. Thereafter it's "just the facts." It tells us considerably less than the CER report concerning the companies' characteristics but somewhat more about the individual schools that they operate. This one is free for the downloading (in both HTML and PDF formats) at http://www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/Archives/CERU%20Archives/ceru-rw.htm.