Funny. I was asked this morning whether the Waltons had a profit motive in seeking privatization of public schools in Arkansas. I said some had made that suggestion, but it wasn’t the reason for my objection to their effort to privatize the Little Rock School District.

Then somebody sent me this link from Daily Kos.

The “charitable” foundation of the Walmart heirs got together with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation last week to help hedge funds figure out how to profit off of charter schools. Seriously. The event was called “Bonds and Blackboards: Investing in Charter Schools. With the explicit intent of helping investors “Learn and understand the value of investing in charter schools and best practices for assessing their credit,” the event featured experts on charter school investing from Standard & Poor’s, Piper Jaffray, Bank of America, and Wells Capital Management, among others. […] “It’s a very stable business, very recession resistant, it’s a high demand product. There are 400,000 kids on waiting lists for charter schools … the industry is growing about 12-14% a year,” David Brain, former President and CEO at EPR Properties, told CNBC in 2012. “It’s a public payer, the state is the payer on this category,” he added in support of the highly safe investing opportunities in charter schools.

The writer of this item thinks the big push isn’t about civil rights or kids but pushing millions of dollars into private corporations that run charter schools.