The model is not complicated
A private equity firm raises a fund, usually a few billion dollars from pensions, endowments, and wealthy families. The fund has a clock on it: investors want their money back, with returns, in roughly seven to ten years.
To hit those returns, the firm buys companies, restructures them to throw off more cash, and sells them to the next buyer at a higher multiple. It is not a long-term ownership model. It was never designed to be.
When the asset being restructured is a steel mill, the consequences land on workers and communities. When the asset is the place that watches your three-year-old, the consequences land on your child.
What changes the day after the deal closes
The signage usually stays the same. The director might too, for a while. What changes is invisible to families and immediate to staff.
- —Ratios get worse. More children per teacher, the legal maximum in every state where it can be reached.
- —Wages stagnate. Teachers leave. The ones who stay are stretched. Turnover, the single biggest predictor of quality in early childhood, climbs.
- —Tuition goes up. Often quietly, often via fees: registration, supplies, late pickup, lunch, enrichment, technology.
- —Real estate gets sold. The building is split off into a separate entity and leased back to the school at a premium. Rent becomes a recurring extraction.
- —Curricula get centralized. Decisions move from the people who know your child to a corporate office in another time zone.
Why education, and why now
Childcare and early education check every box a PE firm looks for: fragmented (lots of small operators to roll up), price-inelastic (parents will pay almost anything), heavily subsidized (federal and state dollars flow in regardless of quality), and emotionally captive (you do not switch daycares lightly).
The same dynamic played out in nursing homes a decade ago, and in physician practices five years ago. The research on both is now in. In nursing homes, private equity ownership raised the chance that a Medicare patient died during or soon after their stay by about 11 percent (Gupta, Howell, Yannelis and Gupta, The Review of Financial Studies, 2024). In physician practices, the amount paid per claim rose about 11 percent after private equity bought in (Singh and colleagues, JAMA Health Forum, 2022). There is no reason to expect a different result in a kindergarten.
What this database is for
Almost none of this is disclosed to families. Acquisitions are announced in industry trade press, not in the Friday folder. Holding-company structures are designed to obscure who actually owns the building.
We built this lookup so a parent can type in the name of their school and get a straight answer. Not a lecture. Not a sales pitch. Just: yes, this place is owned by a private equity firm called X, which acquired it on Y date, and here is what else they own.
What you do with that information is up to you. Some families will stay and organize. Some will leave. Some will start something new with other families on their block, which is, in the end, what BOWER exists to help with.
The information asymmetry is the point
A market only works when both sides know what they are buying. Right now, in early education, only one side does. This page is a small attempt to close that gap.
— Isabel Donaldson, founder of BOWER