[WS:] I think you give them too much credit - it would require strategic thinking of which most of these business types are not capable. Their more likely modus operandi is to jump on a bandwagon and grab what they can while they can. So it is more like smelling an opportunity of diverting tax money to private pockets. Public education absorbs a lot of local taxes and the business types probably salivate on the very thought of getting that money. Public education money already subsidizes local construction businesses (school construction) hi tech industry (IT) and the testing industry but the bulk of it is spent on unionized teachers. That is very un-American. The only way the American business can succeed (i.e make the owners fabulously wealthy without doing jack shit) is to receive public subsidies through political patronage.
BTW, there is a good piece by Powell & Owen-Smith on commercialization of the "non-profit" university system some time ago that involved a deliberate government policy of letting the unis claim intellectual property rights to their research. The main point is that commercialization was really an opportunistic behavior in response to the actions of the political class pursuing a neoliberal political agenda. I think that something similar is going on with K12 education - it coming mostly from the political class - the Obama administration and Republicans - and the money grubbers simply smell the blood and go into the feeding frenzy.
I sincerely doubt that "taking away resources from the poor" enters this calculus at all. It might have some fifty or so years ago, when they still felt the heat of Communism and they were in the strategic thinking mode. But today it is a free fall - grab what you can while you can before the whole system collapses under its own weight. This country is not run by evil strategic planners anymore but by common thieves, swindlers, gangsters and their moronic political patrons.
Besides, what the poor tend to see as their resources nowadays is not education but circuses - tee-vee, iphones, games, shows and the like - which the capitalists are more than willing to supply in large quantities.
Wojtek