CHEYENNE - From busing children to school to making their lunchtime meals, private companies are increasingly performing work traditionally done by school district employees, a National Education Association official said in Cheyenne on Wednesday.

If not reversed, that trend has the potential to seriously damage the country's public education system, said NEA Secretary-Treasurer Lily Eskelsen.

"We think there are certain things that are public services that shouldn't be at the mercy of CEO stock options," Eskelsen said.

For example, she said, a private company running a school might conclude that it is not very cost-effective to teach special education students, or to teach English as a foreign language.

As a logical consequence of profit motive, special education or non-English-speaking students could get left behind in a privatized educational system, Eskelsen said.

Public school employees "think that all children deserve adequate services," she said. "We don't pick and chose the students we want the way private schools can."

She said there are political leaders in this country who seem to despise anything with the word "public" in its title while deeming anything "private" to be good and efficient.

The result, she said, is a trend to privatize as many industries, including utilities, a move that contributed to the electricity crisis in California three years ago and the Enron scandal.

"Those kinds of things were kind of brushed off 10, 15 years ago as radical," Eskelsen said.

But now, key public leaders are moving toward privatization to solve the nation's challenges, and the NEA's position is that the trend is bad for public schools, for working Americans, and for the communities in which they live.

"We believe public dollars should be devoted to those institutions that have public accountability," she said.

Eskelsen's concern over privatization trends in public education was the main focus of her keynote breakfast speech at the Wyoming Education Association's summer institute as well as her subsequent press conference, but she couldn't resist criticizing a controversial federal education law.

When asked about legislative issues on her group's agenda, the first words out of her mouth were, "No Child Left Behind," which she called "the most ironically named title you could ever name a law that is, in essence, turning our schools into testing factories."

Among the provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act is to set testing targets that all of a school's students must meet by 2015 in order for the school to avoid being labeled a failing school and being penalized, Eskelsen said.

She said public opposition to the No Child Left Behind Act is a nonpartisan issue, as is evident from the stances taken by her left-leaning teachers' group as well as her right-leaning state of residence.

"When you have the Utah State Legislature agree with the NEA, you're in a parallel universe here," she said.

Eskelsen said the law needs to at least recognize when a school's students are making steady progress even if they don't achieve target scores on standardized tests.