Education Week reports that Betsy DeVos and ALEC are natural partners.

U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos—an ardent school choice supporter who has turned out to be among the Trump administration’s most polarizing cabinet picks—will deliver a speech this week to members of a controversial organization that some argue is her best shot at advancing an aggressive school choice agenda.

The American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, is known for drafting conservative model legislation in states on a range of issues including gun rights, tax reform, and education. DeVos will appear at ALEC’s annual meeting Thursday in Denver.

Ask a conservative, and they’re likely to describe ALEC as a membership organization that brings together private industry leaders and Republican state lawmakers to draft soundly conservative policies. Ask a liberal, and they’re likely to say ALEC is a shadowy group of corporate types pushing a destructive, far-right agenda.

But regardless of political persuasion, there are two points most would agree on: ALEC is successful at influencing policy in statehouses, and its focus on private school choice dovetails perfectly with DeVos’ education priorities.

“There are lots of groups that do model legislation, but nobody as successfully as ALEC,” said Gary Miron, a professor at Western Michigan University and a member of the left-leaning National Education Policy Center, which has also started writing its own model legislation.

Model Legislation

ALEC has crafted model legislation on education issues such as curbing tuition costs at state universities and performance-based pay for teachers, but a significant share of the bills it writes focus on school choice.

It has drafted bills calling for more regulatory freedom for home-schooling families and charter schools, and bills to create full-time online schools and open enrollment, which would allow students to attend any public school­ they want, even if it’s in another district.

Its model legislation for private school choice—programs such as vouchers, tax-credit scholarships, and education savings accounts—is a prominent part of its legislative portfolio for education. All three types of those choice programs provide public money to families or organizations to pay for private school tuition or other education expenses.

Education savings accounts, in particular, demonstrate how ALEC helps plant seeds for new policy ideas, said Michael Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-leaning think tank based in Washington.

“You definitely see the [ESA] model legislation show up in the states, and even though it might get tweaked along the way, it’s often a starting point,” Petrilli said. “It’s an important part of the sausage making. In fact, this meeting is in the summer, so I’d say this is where the sausage making starts.”

Originally developed in Arizona by the Goldwater Institute, proposals for education savings accounts—which allow families to spend state education dollars on approved expenses such as private school tuition, tutoring, or therapy—are popping up in a growing number of states. While bills to establish ESAs were introduced in 18 states this spring, only one passed—in North Carolina.

The Goldwater Institute, whose current education director co-chaired ALEC’s education task force committee for several years, helped draft ALEC’s model education savings account bill.

Other prominent school choice advocacy organizations that belong to ALEC, either as members or conference sponsors, are EdChoice and the American Federation for Children, a group Betsy DeVos helped found and used to chair.

Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute (a free-market think-tank, funded in part by Betsy DeVos) defends DeVos addressing ALEC. Why not? They agree.

Rick is right. DeVos is a radical extremist speaking to an organization of radical extremists. Why the surprise?

Incidentally, I heard from an informed source (not Fake News) that Ref Rodriguez, the new chair of the LAUSD school board (and owner of a charter chain) had handed out copies of Hess’s book “Cage-Busting Leadership” to other members of the board of Los Angeles.