NBCT high school teacher and blogger Justin Parmenter discovered a shocking fact: a company in the state called SAS pays to send state legislators to the annual conference of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a far-right anti-public school organization that writes model legislation. SAS sells software to districts and states to evaluate teacher effectiveness. The SAS software is very controversial because it’s algorithms are secret and proprietary. Teachers in Houston sued and won a court judgement against SAS, when the judge ruled that its secret processes were arbitrary and denied due process to teachers, who had no way to know how they were judged or if the calculations were accurate.
Parmenter writes:
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is an infamous legislation factory which is notoriously hostile toward traditional public schools. Its model bills are passed into law–often word for word–by state legislatures around the country.
ALEC’s education platform claims the nation’s K-12 education system is “failing our students, leaving them unprepared for college, careers, or life,” and the policies the organization writes for lawmakers offer a smorgasbord of legislative pathways for defunding public schools, especially those that serve high-poverty students.
That’s why it’s so disappointing to learn that one of North Carolina K-12 public education’s most high-profile partners, SAS Institute, is paying for members of North Carolina’s General Assembly to travel to ALEC’s annual meetings, where viewing and discussing the group’s suggested anti-public school policies is one of the primary activities.
SAS Institute is a privately held analytics software company based in Cary, NC. Its founder and CEO James Goodnight’s net worth is estimated at more than $13 billion, making him the richest person in North Carolina by a wide margin.
SAS has an extremely cozy relationship with the NC Department of Public Instruction (DPI). Just last month, for example, SAS hosted an event where company software specialists and professional educators including DPI Deputy Superintendent of District Support Dr. Beverly Emory presented on how to use SAS data in public schools.
Millions of North Carolina taxpayer dollars go to SAS every year for a variety of software-related education contracts. The company provides K-12 teachers with EVAAS ratings, which employ a secret algorithm to measure individual teachers’ effectiveness using DPI’s standardized test data. It also produces the North Carolina School Report Cards.
North Carolina’s School Report Cards assign each school a single A-F letter grade representing its overall performance. The report cards have been controversial since state legislators introduced them in 2013 as the grades are highly correlated with levels of poverty and sometimes have the effect of pushing families away from traditional public schools.
Probably not by coincidence, ALEC has been peddling its “A-Plus Literacy Act” to lawmakers since early 2011. The model bill recommends a statewide A-F school report card system with a special focus on reporting results for students who score in the lowest 25th percentile, and it refers to the grading system as a “lynchpin for reforms.” One such reform is also included in the bill, as ALEC recommends students who attend F schools be given an opportunity to enroll in private schools instead.
A cozy arrangement indeed!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is, I am fairly sure, the company that bought the VAM model of Bill Sanders used in Tennessee.
Exactly right. Sanders started SAS and VAMMING teachers in Tennessee.
Indeed they are. They have taken Sanders’ VAM model and used it to create EVAAS, which is even now used to plague us as teachers here in NC. It’s a completely unproven (even disproven, if you accept what the American Statistical Association has to say about the use of VAM in education) way to apply “growth” scores to students and their teachers, based on statistically invalid comparisons with past test performance.
What’s interesting is that it now appears that EVAAS is going to be severely scaled back in NC, since the state eliminated all the NC Final Exam tests as of next year. Only the few EOC (End of Course) tests that meet federal requirements will be retained. The question we all have here is what is going to be replacing EVAAS for evaluation purposes for all of us who teach NCFE courses. What that is, the DPI has not yet made clear. I’ll be shocked if it isn’t some new product from SAS being sold to the state on an even more lucrative contract than EVAAS was.
SAS Sauce
The secret sauce
Of SAS
Is albatross
Around our neck
They buy the “right”
To sell in schools
On darkest night
From ALEC tools
Song of the North Carolina Legislator
Deck the hall with ALEC folly.
Fa la la la la, la la la la
Serving grifters makes us jolly.
Fa la la la la, la la la la.
We have views so crude and narrow.
Fa la la, la la la, la la la.
Eat the poor and suck the marrow.
Fa la la la la, la la la la.
ALEC is the subversive Deep State.
ALEC is indeed the Deep State. It speaks for the billionaires and corporations that want to subvert democracy and impose their self-interest on the public.
Many state legislators are humbled to be in the presence of very rich people and swallow the ALEC line. They want to be invited back to the next posh resort.
ALEC was founded by Paul Weyrich who co-founded the religious right with Jerry Falwell.
Weyrich also founded the Koch’s Heritage Foundation.
The Center for Media and Democracy is a great source for info. about ALEC, specifically the sites, Right Wing Watch and ALEC Exposed.
There’s no defending any relationship SAS has with ALEC. And, really, there’s not much defense in using software to determine teacher “effectiveness.” But, I’ll suppose, data geeks may actually think their software can calibrate an effectively measure almost anything.
It’s sad what Republicans in North Carolina have done to teachers and public education. And it isn’t only in North Carolina. Republicans have become the scourge of public schooling across the country.
As to SAS, it does treat its employees well. Or, it used to. SAS routinely was in the top ten or top twenty of Fortune’s ‘Best Companies to Work for. For 2019, however, it has slipped to number 60. By contrast, Wegman’s grocery stores is #3 in 2019, and has remained in the top twenty or 20 for the last fifteen or twenty years.
About fifteen years ago, 60 Minutes did a story on SAS titled ‘The Royal Treatment.’ Morley Safer noted that – at the time – ” SAS has never had a losing year and never laid off a single employee. Last year they sold $1 billion worth of their analytical software to America’s biggest corporations. This software is sophisticated stuff that helps everyone from Victoria’s Secret to the U.S. military work more efficiently, by turning raw data into useful information.”
Maybe not so “efficiently” for public schools and teachers.
Here’s the 60 Minutes video…
Not just Republicans, neo-liberals and libertarians are also part of that scourge.