Not acceptable. Schools do not exist to make money like that.

It's like if the government produced and sold breakfast cereal. Could they do it and make money? Certainly. Would it raise money for the things we want? Yes. Is it OK? No.

Well when you spend $60 million dollars to build a high school stadium it might be pretty hard to make that money back...

http://www.wfaa.com/sports/high-school/New-60-million-Allen-stadium-one-of-a-kind-164931536.html

The voters voted for the bonds though.

A lot of college teams are money-losing operations. This isn't the case with high-school teams, but do the profits generally go elsewhere than the athletics program?

Why?

Why is it unacceptable for schools to make money like that?

For that matter, what's wrong with the government making someone money selling cereal. (So long as they don't make any laws to favor cereal.)

If you don't see what's wrong with that I cannot discuss this with you any further.

Why?

Why is it unacceptable for schools to make money like that?

For that matter, what's wrong with the government making someone money selling cereal. (So long as they don't make any laws to favor cereal.)

Australia for example I think have mostly had success with their GBE's and actually had problems since privatising some of them.

When run like independent companies they work great.  They only ever have problems when they're run like policy machines.  (See Fannie and Freddy.)

In my experience, public-private partnerships in the UK have been NOTHING but failure - private finance initiatives causing unimaginable off-balance-sheet debt, IT contracting, railways, utilities (spiralling costs, no maintinence), security contracting, driving test charges, school academies (my own headteacher who ran four schools privately is now jailed for fraud). NHS trusts with 10 layers of middle management and $200k executive directors of county councils. I would run for office on complete and utter seperation of those two if I could.

It just leads to a conflating of profit motive (to provide the least possible service) and election motive (to keep everyone happy from the poorest to richest). People with no commercial experience spend other people's money to something that creates market distortion, unassaiable monopolies, and distracts from the actual mission of the public body.

The breakfast cereal example is even more absurd than all of those things because it is effectively advocating communism (which doesn't work). If the state owns the means of production, normal companies cannot possibly compete and an efficient market is out of reach.

Do those groups activly try and make money for the government?  Or are they groups that pay the government so they can make money.

In the UK, most of the things I listed operate as a quasi-nongovernmental organisation and try to make a profit for the government. The contracting stuff doesn't, but it's an example of how mixing public and private motives don't work.

Outside which, in the cereal example, the government owns ONE means of production out of many... and companies certaintly could compete. 

No. The government has unlimited capital and virtually zero risk.

I mean hell, schools are the perfect example.

private schools actually provide a cheaper more effective product on average...

Hell no.

even just "devolved" local schools do better, magnet schools and charter schools.  

People will tell you charter and magnet schools do worse, but they're decepitve when they do, because what they do is average all the charter and magnet schools scores vs a states entire public school record.  Ignoring the fact that charter and magnet schools only open in the worst neighberhoods.   Comparitive to other schools they do far better.

In the US. Where public education is a complete disaster (I spent three years under the American system and it would take that long to list its faults). In the UK, there's no difference between state and managed schools, except that the managed schools take far more money (they took the entire county's allocation of rebuilding capital and spent it on statues, a rifle range and equestrian centre), are involved in fraud, and are completely unaccountable when things go wrong. Private schools are a little better, but their fees are astronomically expensive and their results attributable to like the 1:5 student:staff ratio. Public schools can never match those resources no matter how they are managed.

...unless the funding is uneven. I can't believe your country allows schools to be based on property taxes. It's like you hate the words 'equal opportunity'.

If the government can make money off a volentary product or source that's more likely than not to make money.  I've got no problem with it.  It's getting the most for your tax dollars. 

True communism. Doesn't work.