Betsy DeVos will be the keynote speaker at the ALEC annual meeting in Denver this week. Protestors will be there to greet her, although the U.S. Department of Education is keeping silent about which day she will appear.
ALEC has been promoting deregulation and privatization since the early 1970s. It is funded by major corporations and has nearly 2,000 members who are state legislators. It writes model legislation, which its members bring home and introduce in their own state. ALEC promotes charters and vouchers. It wants to eliminate unions, tenure, and seniority.
The linked Chalkbeat article says,
“ALEC is best known for crafting “model” legislation advancing conservative principles on issues ranging from tax limitations to gun safety and the environment.”
That’s not quite right. ALEC wants to eliminate all environmental regulations and gun controls.
Colorado’s Senator Michael Bennett wants to show DeVos a Denver “public school.” He is the most fervent supporter of charter schools among Senate Democrats, so he will most likely show her a Denver charter school. It is embarrassing for a Democrat like Bennett to admit that he and a radical extremist like DeVos agree about school choice, so he will try to find some way to pretend that charters are the good way to privatize schools, but vouchers are the bad way.
DeVos will not be convinced.
Here is the agenda for the ALEC meeting. It doesn’t show when DeVos is speaking, apparently a state secret.
To learn more about ALEC, its corporate sponsors, and its legislative members, check out the website ALEC Exposed.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
*Diane** DeVos is in breach of her PUBLIC trust. Those who put her there are also in breach of THEIR public trust. Their across-the-board shift away from their oath of office (oddly for Betsy, who apparently still believes in the meaning of swearing allegiance to such things) and the trust that the oath embodies, is a clear “in-your-face” to the small-d democratic principles that the oath is about.
To use DeVos’ “NEUTRAL” metaphor, in her omissions and actions she is “neutralizing” her oath of office to the PUBLIC institutions that make concrete the meaning of the U. S. Constitution that she doesn’t even pretend to be faithful to.
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https://actionnetwork.org/letters/is-your-representative-headed-to-denver
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Jeff makes it easy for us to contact our state legislators. Just click on the link. Stand up against ALEC has a letter posted which will be sent from you to your state senator and state representative. It’s the best 5 sec. you will spend today.
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Wonder where the DEMs are with this one? The DEMs’ policies re: education actually helped/helps DeVoodoo and the GOP agenda.
Too bad the DEMs turned their backs on PUBLIC SCHOOLS, Public School Teachers, Public School students and their parents/guardians.
Imagine if the DEMs had the every single public school teacher backing them. But, NO…they had to go stupid and repressive (punishments) with standards and testing…KA-CHING for the FEW,
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The Dems could have won the 1000 seats they lost if they had exposed ALEC, the tech tyrants and DFER.
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If ALEC was labeled as a terrorist organization by Homeland Security, would that mean the use of drones and Hellfire Missiles to take them out?
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So creative!
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“ALEC has adopted model legislation based on the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) that it promotes to other states and has pushed model bills on gun rights, turning over public lands to state governments and parent choice regarding their children’s education, sometimes viewed as code for vouchers or charter schools.”
From an online newspaper in Denver NOT funded by “education reformers.” Read the full article here.
http://www.coloradoindependent.com/166298/alec-denver-2017-common-cause
Honestly, DeVos and DPS starting with Michel Bennet and currently his childhood friend, Tom Boasberg, are closely aligned on the two big C’S: Choice and charters. DeVos takes Choice a bit further – vouchers for all – but I’ve said repeatedly, once you open the drip of choice, it is difficult to stop the flood from coming. As for charters – well Colorado has unlimited charters; DPS has close to half of its schools privatized, i.e. charters.
Our Denver, Our Schools, an organization of parents, teachers, communities, students, is planning on protesting ALEC in general, Betsy in particular Wednesday at the state Capitol at 10 a.m. Look for us and join us in the rally and march!
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Laura Chapman and Jeannie Kaplan The return to the states, in the case of Jeannie’s reference to “turning over public lands to state governments,” is a ploy to shift (wrench) power away from the “Federal” Government, its oversight and regulatory functions, and its intimate connection with the founding documents and small-d democratic laws that flow from them.
If that’s the case, then it may explain Laura’s note where she writes: “Baby ALEC, the American City County Legislative Exchange, has some draft legislation that would force ‘coordination’ between federal policies and those at the local level. This is a weird proposal.”
Not so weird when you consider that for them, “LOCAL” is another code word. It doesn’t mean the parents or the duly elected school board members who have “skin in the game,” or truly geographically-local businesses (aka not national brand corporations working at the local level), or even state legislators insofar as they work for “the people.” <–LOCAL doesn’t mean these.
Rather LOCAL means “those locally-inserted and often paid poison plants–anti-democratic people and organizations that work for ALEC-supported and funded organizations.” As a general point, we cannot assume that they mean by such terms as “local” what we mean by those same terms.
**Will the power be local by what Alec means by it? YES! Will the power be local by what we mean by it? NO. . . . insofar as the power is in informed (not with more double-speak) and truly local people (the actual demos of the area) have it. **
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Baby ALEC, the American City County Legislative Exchange has some draft legislation that would force “coordination” between federal policies and those at the local level. This is a wierd proposal. Maybe ALEC thinks that it has control of federal policies and that it is a no-brainer to “coordinate” these with local policies. The argument really is for top down coordination, a strategy that kills local voices and helps nullify local initiatives. The American City County Legislative Exchange, a spinoff from ALEC to control local ordinances and other matters, is no less dangeous than ALEC. See the ALEC conference program for other draft legislation from Baby ALEC.
https://www.alec.org/model-policy/an-ordinance-for-local-coordination-on-federal-regulations/
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The public employees at the US Department of Education are taking yet another field trip to bash public schools?
How do they see their role, I wonder? Do they think these anti-public school events are in any way helpful to any of the 90% of US children who attend public schools?
In what way? What value does this campaigning for privatization add for public school children?
Maybe DeVos could spend one day out of the next 6 months actually doing something practical and helpful for children in US public schools- she sure hasn’t added any value thus far. I’m aware of her intense dislike of our childrens’ schools- I don’t care. When she took this job she must have known she’d be expected to work on behalf of the unfashionable “government schools”.
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DeVos should stop selling ed tech product to public schools out of the US Department of Education.
Ed tech companies already have salespeople. We don’t need 2000 federal employees pitching product to public schools under the guise of “equity” or “innovation”.
How about we let Google or the manufacturers of these products sell Chromebooks and the public employees can do something else?
They’re good at sales, Google. They don’t need Betsy DeVos and her enormous staff taking a sales territory.
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Here’s what DeVos is working on today:
“That spirit of service reminds me of my friend Jen, who together with her husband adopted a daughter with physical and cognitive disabilities. They already had two biological children, but they felt called to help give this child a better life…
Jen was able to move her daughter to a school that she and her husband chose, and she is now thriving. They’re fortunate they were able to find a good fit, but many parents don’t get the same chance – they don’t have access to a wide menu of options, or the resources to move to a different school district, let alone state.”
All day, every day they push the “choice” theme. God forbid she should put in an hours work towards the schools 90% of kids attend, right?
She’s not the US Secretary of Education- she’s the same thing she’s always been- a lobbyist for charter and private schools. And we’re all paying for this political campaign she’s conducting.
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It’s ironic to me that DeVos is speaking at a conference to promote charters and vouchers 75 minutes away from my ( now adult) children’s most favorite public school system: Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs. Of the seven school districts they attended growing up as Army “brats,” they tell me to this day that Cheyenne Mounrain was the best. They describe the programs and teachers as the most engaging, challenging, nurturing, and informative of all the schools ( five different states and one overseas country) they attended.
DeVos’s lack of curiosity about the public schools she’s charged to oversee is the antithesis of public education’s main objective: enlightenment.
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Stand Up to ALEC sent out an e-mail today w/a link to click on to see if one’s state legislators were attending. If you’ve received that e-mail, I strongly suggest that you forward it all over the place (I’m doing the same w/this post)–as we readers here know, too many people still don’t know about ALEC. Given this information, people all over the country can track their legislators & will then, perhaps, bring more people to the front to run against any ALEC toadies.
In all of this, ALEC is Ground Zero…44 years strong, & still going on.
Keep your eyes & ears open for a 45th birthday party in some city next year, & start organizing–if you get a large enough crowd (!), perhaps the msm will cover you.
1,000+ downtown Chicago protesters weren’t enough (even w/Rev. Jesse Jackson speaking) to get any stories in 2013.
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There will be stories in Denver, I am betting, because the “reformies” here have to try to show how they are different from DeVos/trump. Not so much. It’s choice and charters all the time.
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ALEC = Koch Brothers = Fundie xtian right zealots = destruction of democracy = xtian caliphate = Betsy DeVos = god’s chosen people ≠ most of us here.
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A substantial portion of Gordon Lafer’s book, “The One Percent Solution: How corporations are remaking America one state at a time”, is devoted to ALEC’s agenda.
He identifies the 4 types of initiatives. (1) Laws that constrain or abolish the avenues that working people have to challenge corporate power. (2) Privatization of pubic services which removes the points where protest might coalesce. What were once issues resolved by democratically accountable officials become customer service issues. (3) Restrictions on policies that could have redistributive effect for the 99% e.g. policing wage theft, raising minimum wage. (4) Encouragement of a cultural shift to lowered expectations -normalizing downward mobility e.g. Corporate propaganda, “Don’t expect Social Security in the future.”
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Linda Very helpful. Thank you for posting. It’s like reading the “invisible hand” behind all of the strange shifts of meaning that SEEM to change all by themselves. But of course they don’t.
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Your library might order the book, if you request it. Mine did. That makes the plot readable for free for all in the community.
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Linda It sounds like the playbook for hoodwinking the American people.
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ALEC has changed. Many corporations renounced their affiliations with ALEC and it is now more like a fringe conservative think tank than a real coalition of business interests. DeVos attendance at ALEC demonstrates the administrations affiliation with some very questionable organizations.
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ALEC was proposing voucher and tuition tax credit state legislation years before they became part of the Republican Party agenda. They are also long-standing proponents of cuts to public schools. When vouchers drained public schools to finance private schools, it was a dream come true for the Koch brothers and their ALEC creation.
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