Walmart heirs' foundation advises hedge funds on how to profit from charter schools

Walmart heir Rob Walton

Walmart heir Rob Walton

Charming. 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.

(FYI, charter school waitlist numbers are usually to be taken with several grains of salt.)

This is philanthropy, Walton- and Gates-style: figuring out how millionaires and billionaires can profit off of drawing money out of traditional public schools and into charters and then into hedge fund coffers? And the lessons in how to profit are coupled with a massive campaign to buy the policies that make the profit possible to begin with.

They say it's about "civil rights" but this is the real story of the big-money push for charter schools.