Why Is For‐​Profit Education So Difficult in the U.S.?

Matt Yglesias has a post up looking at the PISA scores, and he seems to imply that for‐​profit schooling has been tried and found wanting in Sweden and the U.S.:

The big difference is that many Swedish charters are run by for‐​profit firms. We’ve had some experiments with that in the U.S. and it hasn’t worked very well. Nobody’s really found a great way of making consistent profits running K‑12 schools in America.

Of course even he notes that Sweden’s schools are highly regulated by the state.


And in the U.S., the difficulty of succeeding in for‐​profit education just might have something to do with that government monopoly on k‑12 education and the $560 billion or so in tax revenues that fund it. Maybe.