Want to know who is pulling the stings of he corporate reform movement?
Keep your eye on ALEC, short for the American Legislative Exchange Council.
This is a secretive group of about 2,000 state legislators, major corporations and far-right think tanks.
The goal of ALEC is privatization and advancing the interests of corporations.
ALEC drafts model laws and its members introduce them in their state, sometimes verbatim.
ALEC has model was for charter schools, vouchers, online charter schools, for-profit schools, and laws to weaken or eliminate collective bargaining, teacher tenure, and certification. It wants a free market.
Recently, ALEC debated Common Core and came close to passing a resolution opposing the standards as a federal takeover. But Jeb Bush intervened and persuaded his friends to remain neutral.
Some of the corporate sponsors dropped out last year because of ALEC’s sponsorship of the “Stand Your Ground” legislation in Florida, invoked by the man who killed an unarmed black teen.
Here is a list of ALEC’s education task force members.
You may see some of your state legislators on the list.
To learn more about ALEC, read this informative article by Julie Underwood, dean of the school of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
ALEC Exposed is the best website to learn about ALEC’s ambitious plans to privatize and deregulate many spheres of American society while benefitting big corporations.
When I blogged at Education Week, I wrote a post about ALEC. Its policy director wrote to say that President Obama shares many of ALEC’s goals. It is a strange time we live in.
I notice that Dell and Scantron are listed. I wonder how many school districts, like my own, are unwittingly supporting those companies without realizing that they are part of the ALEC scam. I know that every computer purchased in our school district is a Dell and our mandatory benchmark tests given three times per year are by Scantron. The ALEC web is oh so tangled… Are we participating in our own downfall? Yes we are!
Scantron appears to be one of a number of ed companies that have dropped out of ALEC in the last year.
There are several Facebook groups that track ALEC …
Here’s one —
• ALEC Monitors
Here’s another —
• Resist the Privatization of America
And another —
• Voters’ Legislative Transparency Project
This is a worrisome group and I applaud the watchdogs. The overall dollars don’t seem to be particularly large, which to me makes ALEC even more worrisome, because it shows how pre-disposed lawmakers are to cut-and-paste their legislative proposals from Big Chemical, Big Pharma, and Big Tobacco. The efficiency of the “clearinghouse” model may be more effective than cash.
It kind of like that old perfect squelch …
We’ve established what they are —
now we’re just haggling over the price.
Julie Underwood’s indepth discussion about the ALEC’s powerful influence is a must read.
Here’s just on take-away:
From now on, champions of public education have a new set of questions to ask whenever legislation is introduced:
• Is the sponsor a member of ALEC?
• Does the bill borrow from ALEC model legislation?
• What corporations had a hand in drafting the legislation?
• What interests would benefit or even profit from its passage?
Ultimately, however, the most important question we must all ask is whether ALEC’s influence builds or undermines democracy.
oops … Here’s just ONE take-away:
“Free Market” (read: slave society)
Now I get it — all this time I thought you were talking about ALEC Baldwin.