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.
These are the people our Founders warned us about.
ALEC, the Unelected Shadow Government,
and
Amway Betsy, Queen of the Education Pyramid Scheme.
You got this right, Jon. It’s SICK.
This is a not-to-be-missed Huffington Post commentary from Chris Cotton, high school teacher in Ohio, who offers an uncommon perspective on ALEC and like organizations serving the interests of the few, hollowing out democratic institutions, with public schools one example.
There are others examples of a systemic decline in major institutions–including the Supreme Court’s privileging of corporate speech and economic values in recent cases, the bombast of Trump’s attacks on the press as “the enemy,” dismantling of the State Department, weakening of Civil Rights protections, voter intimidation, the apparent indifference of the President and White House to nepotism and conflicts of interest, the pretense of putting America First while “doing deals” for personal gain, indifference to the growing evidence that Trump is a danger to this and other nations.
Please read this commentary by Chris.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-trumputin-hack-theyre-trying-to-take-over-the_us_596e49a3e4b0376db8b65b69?ncid=engmodushpmg00000003
Very interesting, Laura. What is happening in America to public education is more of what Cotton calls “hitman capitalism” than laissez-faire economics. Public education is the direct target of annihilation, and the neo-liberals and radical conservatives have been working for years to poison a fundamental building block of democracy, public education. The capitalist part of the equation is the multi-faceted manipulations along with collusion of many members of federal and state governments with the goal of gaining access to public funds in order to put it in private hands. This is a targeted offense more than the free market at work.
Rodriguez of LAUSD should hand out “Democracy in Chains ” by Nancy MacLean and “The One Percent Solution; How corporations are remaking America one state at a a time” by Gordon Lafer.
Photos and a tweet show AARP Nevada is at the ALEC conference in Denver. Contact AARP and ask them to defend their prior statement that AARP would no longer be involved with ALEC.
The phone number for AARP is 1-888-687-2277. The info. about AARP’s representatives attending the ALEC conference is at the Stand Up to ALEC site.
Can corruption be more explicit than the US secretary of education giving a pillow talk at the main privatization organozation?
Given the situation in D.C., we should expect DeVos to appear at the ALEC conference in the company of Russia’s minister/oligarch of education.
Duncan should have attended with Gates.