Archives for category: ALEC
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Betsy DeVos and ALEC: Perfect Together

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2017 //
9

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.

Categories ALEC, Betsy DeVos

Betsy DeVos and ALEC in Denver This Week

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2017 //
23

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.

Categories ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Denver

Ed Berger: The Stealth Coup to Destroy the American Dream

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2017 //
8

Ed Berger, a retired teacher who lives in Arizona and is active in the struggle to save public schools, has written a powerful post about the billionaire-funded movement to destroy our democracy.

It begins like this. I urge you to read it all:

“Within the core of our freedoms, lie the avenues powerful individuals use to take away the rights of citizens and the controls of government designed and evolved to serve all. Americans are now aware of the reality that subversive forces have made excessive headway in destroying our rights.

“What has been allowed is the incursion of an Oligarchy: The few exploiting the many. We are witnessing the theft of human rights through the infiltration of what were meant to be representative systems within a constitutionally defined government.

“My first introduction to those who want absolute power was through studies of The Robber Barons in America in the 19th Century, and then in the 20th Century, the way Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin took total control of their countries. I learned of an American, Fred Koch, who became wealthy via Russian and German contracts and worked with Stalin and then Hitler as WWII began. He was convinced that absolute dictators were necessary to create strong nations. He came home to change the U.S government into a mechanism which would allow him to acquire power and wealth by any means. His tenets were: Destroy public education. Destroy any kind of worker representation. Control the prison system. Destroy the democratic process by distancing or removing undesirable citizen involvement in decision-making. End government interference in the rights of individuals like himself to create his own empire.

“Koch’s ideology was embedded in the goals of the John Birch Society, founded in the late 50s by Fred and ten others. It was one of many organizations spawned or infiltrated by Koch. Be aware of subversive groups founded by Koch and his sons and other powerful billionaires. Groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) which writes legislation supporting Koch’s political and economic agendas. Know the goals of think tank groups established and funded to carry out Fred’s vision, these include: The Freedom School, the CATO Institute, and Americans For Prosperity among others. Be aware of how Foundations and not-for-profit tax avoidance mechanisms allowed the billionaires to finance their think thanks and other subversive organizations.

“The Koch machine gained the support of other libertarian arch conservatives. Richard Mellon Scaife, Harry and Lynda Bradley, John M. Olin, the Coors brewing family, and the DeVos family, to name some of the big supporters recruited by the Fred Koch and his sons David and Charles. All had acquired vast fortunes from activities that exploited citizens and nature. All were against any type of government that limited their rip, rape, and run business philosophies.

“In the last few years, add the names Bezos, Broad, Cohen, Singer, Schwarzman, Adelson, Hendricks, Mercer, and perhaps the worst of the lot, the Waltons. The Koch ideology also appeals to radical splinter groups of the Christian conservative right which is obsessed with the takeover of the US Government and the dismantling of the government. Understanding this unholy marriage explains why so many Tea Party extremists support Koch and the coup.”

Categories ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Dark Money, Democracy, Inequality, Injustice, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Do Corporations Care about American Workers?

By dianeravitch
June 22, 2017 //
38

This is an excellent article about the nations’ major corporations and their abandonment of their fellow citizens. It was written by Gordon Later and Greg LeRoy and posted by the Economic Policy Institute.

Gordon Later wrote the wonderful book “The One Percent Solution: How Corporations are Remaking America, One State at a Time,” which I highly recommend, to understand how Dark Money has taken over America, state by state.

Are these corporations so multi-national that they don’t care about their hometown or their state? Are they intentionally withdrawing their support from their fellow citizens? Do they consider Americans to be their “fellow citizens”?


When the term “Rustbelt” was coined in the 1980s and activists learned the early warning signs of a plant closing, one of those indicators was tax dodging. If a company knew it was planning to close a factory, it would often challenge its property tax assessment or seek other tax breaks. And why not? If it didn’t expect to be hiring locally in the future, why should an employer care about the quality of the schools?

The national trend today looks like the Rustbelt 1980s on steroids. President Trump’s budget proposal follows the playbook that corporate lobbyists have long pushed in state legislatures: tax cuts for companies and the rich, coupled with dramatic cuts to services that benefit everyone. The resulting permanent damage to those public services begs the question: is Corporate America intentionally disinvesting, abandoning our nation?

In recent years, states and localities across the country have made drastic cuts to essential public services. Texas eliminated over 10,000 teaching jobs, and ended full-day preschool for 100,000 low-income kids. The city of Muncie, Indiana eliminated so many firefighter positions that the area of the city that fire trucks can reach within eight minutes was cut in half. In Milwaukee, budget cuts left the public transit reaching 1,300 fewer employers in 2015 than in 2001.

Local health departments were forced to cut back everything from neonatal care to cancer screening to vision and hearing tests for school children to inspecting food safety in local restaurants. Officials reported that if the nation faces an outbreak similar to the H1N1 flu epidemic, many localities will be unable to vaccinate their residents. Budget cuts were particularly devastating in the country’s school systems. In 2010, the national student-teacher ratio increased for the first time since the Great Depression; and seven years after the onset of the Great Recession, most states had still not restored per-pupil spending to pre-recession levels.

Most striking about these cuts: the legislators who enacted them and the business lobbies that championed them treated them not as temporary tragedies to be repaired when revenues bounced back, but as long-desired permanent cuts to public services. Indeed, many legislatures locked in poorer tax bases by enacting new tax giveaways to corporations and the rich while slashing funding for schools, libraries, and health care. In the same year that Ohio ended full-day kindergarten, legislators phased out the state’s inheritance tax—which had only ever affected the wealthiest seven percent of families.

This agenda was driven by the country’s premier corporate lobbies: chambers of commerce, manufacturers associations, the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, and the Fortune 500 corporations that have participated in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Which begs the question about their motives: why would leading corporations seek permanent cuts to education, libraries or public transit? Don’t they need full access to labor pools of educated workers and decently-paid consumers to buy their products and services? The behavior of the nation’s biggest corporate lobbies appears to be irrational, yet it has been repeated in state after state.

One answer appears to lie in the disturbing fact that the fortunes of “American” corporations have become increasingly divorced from those of American citizens. It may never have been entirely true that “what’s good for General Motors is what’s good for the country,” as the company’s president apocryphally suggested in 1953. But it was closer to true when companies relied on Americans both to make and to buy their products. Today, most GM employees and nearly two-thirds of the cars it sells are overseas; it already sells more cars in China than in the U.S. General Motors has been highly engaged in American politics, including as a member of ALEC.

GM is not exceptional. For the first time, many of the country’s most powerful political actors are companies that may be headquartered in America but don’t primarily depend for their profits upon the fortunes of American society. Foreign sales now account for 48 percent of the S&P 500’s total corporate revenues. Among recent ALEC member corporations, Exxon Mobil, Caterpillar, Procter & Gamble, Pfizer, Dow Chemical, and IBM all earn more than 60 percent of their revenue outside the U.S. Their political interests are increasingly disconnected from the fate of American workers and taxpayers.

The net effect of corporate tax dodging is that by every key measure—share of state revenue, share of GDP, or effective rate—state corporate income taxes have been steadily declining. This creates pressure to raise other taxes, disproportionately borne by working families, who grow to resent a government that costs them more yet delivers less.

Given this reality, we take this corporate-backed push for disinvestment of America’s public sector as a big, loud early warning signal. ALEC’s agenda is not that of employers committed to their surrounding communities. It more resembles that of a company planning to cut and run. For the rest of us who seek good jobs and future opportunity for ourselves and our children, what’s good for GM is good for GM, period.

Categories ALEC, Budget Cuts, Privatization

Mercedes Schneider: Betsy and ALEC, Perfect Together

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2017 //
2

Mercedes Schneider comments on the happy convergence of Betsy DeVos and the notorious anti-government ALEC. Their pro-corporate, profiteering views converge.

In Her Element: US Ed Sec Betsy DeVos to be ALEC Guest Speaker

Schneider knows ALEC well, having written about it in the past. ALEC writes model legislation for states that want to get rid of public schools, teachers’ rights, unions, gun control, and any regulation that interferes with corporate profits.

To learn more about ALEC, go to ALEC Exposed.

Categories ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Betsy DeVos Will Speak at Annual ALEC Meeting in Denver, July 19-21

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2017 //
14

Our Secretary of School Privatization Betsy DeVos will address her colleagues in arms, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), in Denver during their annual conference in mid-July.

DeVos couldn’t find time to meet with the Education Writers Association but she will always have time for ALEC, which is funded by rightwing billionaires and major corporations. ALEC writes model legislation to be introduced in state legislatures, all to advance privatization, deregulation, and corporate profits.

ALEC opposes gun control, environmental regulations, unions, teachers’ tenure and seniority, and public schools.

To learn more about ALEC, go to the website ALEC Exposed.

Categories ALEC, Betsy DeVos

Jan Resseger: Meet the National Lobbyists Who Have Pushed a Far-Right Wing Agenda into the States

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2017 //
30

Jan Resseger read Gordon Lafer’s new book, “The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time,” and she understood the pattern on the rug.

“Gordon Lafer explains that in the November 2010 election, “Eleven state governments switched from Democratic or divided control to unified Republican control of the governorship and both houses of the legislature. Since these lawmakers took office in early 2011, the United States has seen an unprecedented wave of legislation aimed at lowering labor standards and slashing public services.” (p. 2) “In January 2011, legislatures across the country took office under a unique set of circumstances. In many states, new majorities rode to power on the energy of the Tea Party ‘wave’ election and the corporate-backed RedMap campaign… (T)his was the first class of legislators elected under post-Citizens United campaign finance rules, and the sudden influence of unlimited money in politics was felt across the country. Finally, the 2011 legislative sessions opened in the midst of record budget deficits (from the Great Recession), creating an atmosphere of fiscal crisis that made it politically feasible to undertake more dramatic legislation than might otherwise have been possible… For the corporate lobbies and their legislative allies, the 2010 elections created a strategic opportunity to restructure labor relations, political power, and the size of government.” (p 44)…

“Lafer continues: “Political science traditionally views policy initiatives as emerging from either reasoned evaluation of what has worked to address a given social problem, or a strategic response to public opinion. But the corporate agenda for education reform is neither. Its initiatives are not the product of education scholars and often have little or no evidentiary basis to support them. They are also broadly unpopular… In this sense, education policy… provides an instructive window into the ability of corporate lobbies to move an extremely broad and ambitious agenda that is supported neither by social scientific evidence nor by the popular will.” (p. 130)

“Who are the corporate lobbies crafting and pushing the anti-tax, union-bashing, anti-public education agenda? “Almost all of these initiatives reflect ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) model legislation, and have been championed by the Chamber of Commerce, Americans for Prosperity, and a wide range of allied corporate lobbies.” (p. 130) “Furthermore, the corporate agenda is carried out through an integrated network that operates on multiple channels at once: funding ALEC to write bills, craft legislative talking points, and provide a meeting place for legislators and lobbyists to build relationships; supporting local think tanks in the ALEC-affiliated State Policy Network to produce white papers, legislative testimony, opinion columns, and media experts; contributing to candidate campaigns and party committees; making independent expenditures on behalf of lawmakers or issues; and deploying field organizers to key legislative districts.” (p. 39)

“A primary strategy is tax cutting: “‘The best way to stimulate the economy,’ insisted a senior fellow at the Koch-funded Cato Institute, is ‘to shrink government… lower marginal tax rates, and streamline regulations.’ The corporate right’s exhortations for an unprecedented policy of cutting taxes and services in the midst of recession was not an evidence-based policy and indeed did not yield the economic growth its proponents forecast… There was no reason to believe that tax cuts were the key to economic recovery. However continuing tax cuts achieved something else; they dramatically—and perhaps permanently—shrank the size of government.” (p. 65)

“How has all this affected public education? “(B)udget cuts were particularly widespread—and particularly devastating—in the country’s school systems. In 2010-11, 70 percent of all U.S. school districts made cuts to essential services. Despite widespread evidence of the academic and economic value of preschool education, twelve states cut pre-K funding that year, including Arizona, which eliminated it completely. Ohio repealed full-day kindergarten and cut its preschool program to the point that it served 75 percent fewer four-year-olds than it had a decade earlier. Pennsylvania also cut back from full-day to half-day kindergarten in many districts—including Philadelphia, which also eliminated 40 percent of its teaching staff…. More than half the nation’s school districts changed their thermostat settings…. Research shows that the availability of trained librarians makes a significant improvement in student reading and writing skills, yet by 2014, one-third of public schools in the country lacked a full-time certified librarian.” (p. 69)

Conspiracy theory? No, a well-planned, carefully executed plan to cut taxes, kill unions, privatize education.

Categories ALEC, Budget Cuts, Corporate Reform, Privatization, School Choice, Unions

Jeff Bryant: DeVos’s “Transformation”=Public Theft

By dianeravitch
May 26, 2017 //
8

Jeff Bryant has read Betsy DeVos’s speeches slamming public schools and extolling the virtues of public subsidy for private and religious schools. She carefully selects an anecdote to make her case. But she is late to the party. There is now persuasive evidence that students in voucher schools get worse results than their peers in public schools. In addition, many of those who use vouchers are students from affluent families who are happy to have the pyvlid foot the bill for their private school tuition.

Betsy is shilling for her extremist allies at ALEC.

“Declaring “the time has expired for ‘reform,’” she called instead for a “transformation… that will open up America’s closed and antiquated education system.” Her plan also opens your wallet to new moochers of taxpayer dollars.

“By the way, AFC, according to SourceWatch, is a “conservative 501(c)(4) dark money group that promotes the school privatization agenda via the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and other avenues.” It also grew out of a defunct PAC connected to DeVos called “All Children Matter” that ran afoul legally in Ohio and Wisconsin and still owes Ohio $5.3 million for breaking election laws.”

Bryant concludes:

“In her efforts to create the education transformation she calls for, DeVos is supremely eager to “get Washington and the federal bureaucracy out of the way,” but still wants you to pay the cost of privatizing our schools. That’s not an agenda for better schools. It’s about stealing public money.”

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Fraud, Hoax, Privatization, School Choice

Minnesota: Governor Dayton Blocks Reformers’ Efforts to Grant Licenses to Uncertified Teachers

By dianeravitch
May 25, 2017 //
14

Governor Mark Dayton of Minnesota has become a hero of public education.

Despite the pleas of the entire corporate reform movement in Minnesota, Dayton vetoed a bill that would have created a pathway into teaching for uncertified teachers, legislation needed to maintain a teaching force for charter schools.

Minnesota Governor “Disrupts” Right-Wing Education Reformers

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Honor Roll, Minnesota, Teachers and Teaching

Busted Pencils: THEY DID IT!

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2017 //
26

Tim Slekar followed up his earlier post with an announcement that the war against the teaching profession in Wisconsin has reached a new low.

He declared a victory for the far-right ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council, which writes most of the “model laws” to privatize schools and eliminate the teaching profession).

Well today “they” did it. “They” opened the door to deprofesssionalization and authorized the use of emergency licenses to address the “shortage” and placed our most vulnerable children in a defenseless position.

Instead of truly addressing the EXODUS of teachers and the miserable conditions driving teachers out of the profession “they” simply created a pathway into our classrooms for unlicensed and unqualified personnel.

Of course “they” won’t admit this. In fact, “they” already have “talking points” in case someone dare question the integrity of devaluing the teaching profession.

Now let’s be very clear about how these emergency license rules will really play out in schools across the state.

The most qualified teachers will end up in the most affluent areas.

Emergency licensed teachers will end up in high poverty areas.

School districts with money will hire licensed teachers and require specialized licenses for teachers in fields such as special education.

School districts without money will hire emergency certified people and use the new emergency rules to get around the specialized license requirements for fields such as special education.

ALEC will have won another victory because the cost for teachers will be significantly reduced.

And over time, more and more license reductions will eventually result in a deprofessionalized field and our children will suffer as novices with no sense of the professional, ethical, social, and moral obligations required to be a teacher take over our classrooms.

Can we let this happen?

Does anyone seriously believe that we can have a better education system by hiring unlicensed teachers?

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Teacher Shortage, Teachers, Wisconsin
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