A/HRC/41/37 11. In the United States of America, charter schools are publicly funded but privately managed schools that are authorized to operate by a charter or contract with the respective state. Such schools are tuition-free and considered part of the state school system, although they are often reportedly exempt from following certain public regulations.10 The proportion of public schools becoming charter schools increased from 2 to 7 per cent between 2000 and 2015 and in some districts charter schools enrol up to 93 per cent of primary and secondary learners.11 12. There have been massive, unprecedented changes in the structure of education systems, whereby private actors have taken a stronger role in all countries, whether lowincome, middle-income or rich. Those changes create a phenomenon of privatization in and of education. Such rapid, uncontrolled changes may potentially affect many elements of the right to education and Sustainable Development Goal 4. For instance, a large increase in fee-charging private providers threatens the obligation and the objective to deliver “free” and “equitable” quality primary and secondary education for all, as well as equality between girls and boys. In a number of United Nations reports, Human Rights Council resolutions on the right to education, treaty body recommendations and observations from the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights concerns have been raised about the impact of the rapid growth in private schools in terms of educational content, quality, segregation and social inequalities.12 13. Private provision of education is highly diverse and “may be for-profit or charitable, fee charging or free, driven by companies and entrepreneurs or by communities and nongovernmental organisations, formal or informal, supported by the State or totally independent.”13 Types of private actors in education include high-fee private schools; lowcost profit-making schools targeting poor households; commercial private school chains; community and faith-based schools; and charter schools.14 In a draft private sector engagement strategy paper for the period 2019–2022, the Global Partnership for Education distinguishes between for-profit and not-for-profit schools. For-profit schools may be majority internationally or nationally owned network operators, or nationally owned single proprietor schools. Not-for-profit schools include schools run by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and faith-based schools. Each of those types is further broken down between those charging and not charging fees (generally under a public-private partnership arrangement in the for-profit schools). 14. Attempts to distinguish the most problematic forms of private involvement in education have often focused on separating for-profit and not-for-profit institutions. However, the boundary between the two is thin. An organization can, for instance, be registered as not for profit but pay hefty salaries to its founder or director. There have been cases where for-profit schools have attempted to circumvent legislation limiting or forbidding profits by registering as not for profit, but leasing land or material, or buying services, from another for-profit arm. There have also been debates as to when a school is making a profit, versus seeking profits (but not actually making them yet), or what constitutes profit, whether before or after certain forms of investment. Equally, a small organization operating in an informal settlement may be formally registered as for profit, as 10 11 12 13 14 4 See Kevin Murray and others, “At what cost? The charter school model and the human right to education” (November 2014), p. 6. See also Antoni Verger, Mauro Moschetti and Clara Fontdevila, “Unpacking PPPs’ effects on education: what research on vouchers, charters and subsidies tells us”, forthcoming in 2019 and available from www.abidjanprinciples.org/en/background/overview. See National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, “A growing movement: America’s largest public charter school communities” (October 2017). See, for example, A/69/402, A/HRC/29/30 and A/70/342. See also statements by human rights bodies on private education actors, available from www.gi-escr.org/concluding-observations-privateeducation. Sylvain Aubry and Zizipho Zondani, “Learning the lesson: why the EU should defend an alternative model to the privatisation of education”, in Progressive Lab for Sustainable Development: from Vision to Action, Conny Reuter and Ernst Stetter, eds. (Brussels, Foundation for European Progressives Studies and others, 2017). See David Archer, “Rights-based responses to non-state education provision: a tentative typology and some critical reflections” (Action Aid, 2016).