ALEC Has Bad Plans for Education

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is, says The Nation, "a toxic alliance of corporations and state legislatures that work together to ensure that corporate interests stay at the top of legislative agendas across the country."

It's a group where conservative lawmakers and corporate leaders sit down together and draft model legislation that the legislators then carry off to propose back home. ALEC is one reason that nearly-identical conservative bills pop up in many states at the same time. 

The Center for Media and Democracy runs a whole website devoted to ALEC shenanigans. From that site, we can learn that ALEC is funded by many of the usual gang--Koch, Bradley, Searle and Coors plus money laundered by way of groups like DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund. You can also check to see which legislators from your state are ALEC members.

ALEC has a variety of "task forces" including one devoted to education, and they want all the usual rightward things. But you don't hear a lot about it directly because ALEC is pretty diligent about keeping out riff raff and journalists. 

However, if you're a legislator, you can just waltz right in, which is what two Democratic state reps from Wisconsin did. Francesca Hong and Kristina Shelton signed up and went to the annual ALEC meeting (in Orlando). The Wisconsin Examiner wrote up their little adventure (Shelton also tweeted the events), and the whole thing is worth a read, but I want to focus on the education part.

On education, Shelton says, the organization has heavily promoted school privatization proposals, including education savings accounts and universal private school vouchers, such as were included in a sweeping education bill in Arkansas, the LEARNS Act, enacted earlier this year.

“They’re no longer interested in sort of nibbling around the edges on school vouchers,” Shelton says. “They’re going all in — removing the income limits, moving to those education savings accounts, wildly expanding public investment for religious schools … [and] dismantling any sort of bureaucratic accountability measures.”

Hong says the education proposals have also been made with reference to the difficulties that employers have had filling job openings.

“The framing of it didn’t come off as full, ‘We’re attacking public schools,’” Hong says. “This is how we’re going to get more workers is to essentially make schooling and education’s sole purpose is to be producing workers.”

Nothing new there, though they don't always say the quiet part out loud. Shelton told Wisconsin Examiner that people were remarkably open and frank with the two lawmakers (assuming, perhaps, that they were among friends). 

But there you are. Universal vouchers. No government oversight. Taxpayer dollars for religious schools. Education focused on making meat widgets for corporate consumption. A future in which every state is Arkansas. That's the assortment of destructive, counter-democratic, privatizing ideas that ALEC has in mind. And if they aren't already pushing them in your state legislature, they'll get to it any day now.