Education

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(32,342 posts) Sat Aug 25, 2012, 01:18 PM Aug 2012

The Big Business of Charter Schools

http://www.k12newsnetwork.com/2012/08/the-big-business-of-charter-schools-must-read/

<snip>

If you are wondering why you should add charter schools to your investment portfolios, here’s David Brain, head of a major investment concern called Entertainment Properties Trust, to tell you.

(video)

Anchor: Well let me ask you about potential risks, here, to your charter school portfolio, because I understand that three of your nine “Imagine” schools are scheduled to actually lose their charters for the next school year. Does this pose a risk to investors?

DB: Well, occasionally — we have Imagine arrangements on a master lease, so there’s no loss of rents to the company, although occasionally there are losses of charters in certain areas and they’re used to peculiar, ug, particular circumstances. In this case it’s a combination of relationship with the supervisory authorities and educational quality. Sometimes educational quality is very difficult to change in one, two, or three years. It’s a long-term proposition, so uh, there are some of these that occur, but we’ve structured our affairs so this is not going to impact our rent-roll [emphasis mine] and in fact we see this as uh maybe even a good experience as the industry thins out some of the less-performing schools and we move on to the best-performing schools.

There are two videos at the link that aren't the kind you can embed here at DU, so it is worth following the link, esp. for the Democracy Now interview on New Market Tax Credits.