(EAI) secured a contract with Dade County, Florida to run one of their public elementary schools and later with the city of Baltimore, Maryland. To date, various contractors have joined the competition to seek out contracts with public school districts. Chancellor Beacon Academies based in Massachusetts and Miami, Florida has emerged as the second largest for-profit school serving 19,000 students on 46 Campuses in 8 states and DC and both Mosaica Education Inc. and National Heritage Academies have shown headway in the business of running public schools, privately (Miner, 2002).
As privatizing education becomes more favorable in the eyes of various segments of the population, it important to note that many of the "arguments" for and against privatizing education are more akin to ideological and ethical beliefs than actual defendable arguments. Ideological beliefs and mass generalizations which assert that privatizing is just wrong or that the government is just worse than the private sector in all cases are entirely unhelpful in the endeavor to ascertain a clear understanding of the privatization debate because they do not offer any justifiable reasoning for its advantages and disadvantages beyond said ideologies and unreasonable assertions. This being so, an objective examination of the pros and cons of privatization is necessary in order to truly discern the costs and benefits.
The most obvious benefits of privatizing education are the initial economic benefits which are certainly greater in a decentralized school structure given the readily available private funds of a company or corporation (Bennett, 1994). Secondly, there would be no extensive bureaucracy to cut through in order to make the simplest decisions. For example, the system would provide the teachers with greater freedom in decision-making for their individual schools or even classrooms. Contracts which elect private companies to run formerly public schools free the administration at all levels from the extensive negotiation of every decision and therefore can provide improved, smoother running management (Bennett, 1994).