ALEC Has A New Voucher Push

ALEC has set a new goal-- 25 by 2025. That means having 25 states adopt school voucher programs by the end of next year. To push that goal, ALEC has a new initiative called the Education Freedom Alliance, and it is a scary crew.

Who is ALEC?

The American Legislative Exchange Council is a bill mill. It brings conservative legislators and conservative business folks together to write legislation that the legislators then take back to their states. They used to be fairly under the radar, but for the last decade, folks have been catching on. 

ALEC was co-founded by Paul Weyrich, who also co-founded the Heritage Foundation. The group was launched in 1973 as the Conservative Caucus of State Legislators. Their interests extend to pretty much every area of legislation, and that includes an Education and Workplace Development task force.. They get piles of funding from the Bradley Foundation and Charles Koch, and you can spend hours traveling down the ALEC rabbit hole. They have many goals, including huge ones like rewriting the Constitution and just generally turning America into a right wing paradise. 

Who are their partners this time?

Teaming up as leads on the EFA are the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, and the Job Creators Network.

Job Creators Network was founded by Bernie Marcus, the Home Depot founder. Herman Cain had a hand in it, too, though JCN later disavowed him. They have big ties to Rick Berman, a "win ugly" anti-union media guy who specializes in front groups. Their CEO, Alfredo Ortiz, had a hand in helping pass the tax cut bill in 2017. They were big on reopening school buildings during COVID, and helped promote hydroxychloroquine. Funded by small businesses? Unlikely. 

The Committee To Unleash Prosperity is cut from similar cloth. Founded by Arthur Laffer (the Laffer Curve guy) and Stephen Moore, both ALEC stalwarts, along with Steve Forbes and Larry Kudlow. Moore is the founder of Club For Growth, yet another right wing budget-killing activist group of rich folks. Their goal was to "take over" the GOP fundraising and drag the party far right; they have been reliable Trump allies. Moore has been in a variety of thinky tanks, including CATO and the Heritage Foundation.

The CUP website says of its Executive Director that he "keeps the trains running on time." 

So this is ALEC teaming up with a couple of other right wing outfits. And though this is not news, I will point out that none of these groups has the slightest bit of expertise in actual education. Just saying.

Besides the three coalition leaders, there's a whole list of partners, including American Federation for Children, Americans for Prosperity, Center for Education Reform, EdChoice, Goldwater Institute, Heritage Foundation, Kansas Policy Institute, James Madison Institute, Parents Defending Education, Reason Foundation, Stride, and yes every kid. It's a Who's Who of privatizers (and a pretty good list of people who abandoned the charter and school choice cause once they smelled a chance to go full voucher).

So what's the plan here?

There's nothing new in the rhetoric from EFA. Here's the welcoming paragraph from their home page:

The Education Freedom Alliance believes public education dollars can and should follow the student, not the system. Our current “one-size-fits-all” system of public education simply does not work for every student or every family. While there are plenty of students who do perform at their highest level in their local public school, every child is unique, and states should provide parents with options for their children to thrive through policies promoting education freedom.

It's the current voucher pitch-- we're no longer trying to sell them as refuge for students stuck in "failing" schools, because we now know that the data shows that vouchers aren't better at all. And voucherites have fully adopted the goal of universal vouchers because A) it gets them closer to full privatization and B) rich, well-connected people make way better political allies than poor people.  

There's an assortment of "updates" aka PR pieces for the cause that reflect another key tactic-- to go after vouchers state by state. "Fighting for parental rights and education freedom--one state at a time" is in bold font on their page. Voucherites in Congress haven't given up--the House just advanced yet another bill for national vouchers (also ALEC-spawned). But it's likely doomed like all the previous attempts, and EFA's state-by-state strategy may also be a recognition that the election in November isn't necessarily going to result in a friendly administration. IOW, ALEC may smell some Trumpian flop sweat.

If you're wondering whether or not you're on ALEC's voucher hit list, there's a map. There are all the states where they hope to install universal vouchers by the end of 2025. In some cases, the efforts are already under way, and in others they have tried over and over. 

Of course, in zero cases do they plan to achieve their goal by putting it to public vote, because when taxpayers choose, vouchers lose.

But that's the scary part--because crafting and passing legislation that favors their priorities is what ALEC does. They have the connections, the pipelines, the money, and the experience doing this sort of thing, and they've lined up all the privatization heavy hitters to help out. It's one more reason to get involved in the upcoming election and to pay close attention to what your legislature is up to. Privatizers believe their time has come, and they are ready to push hard.