ALEC’s attack on public schools

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Let’s be clear about one thing when it comes to anything that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is involved in has nothing to do with quality education, good government, safe environment, etc. They are concerned with one thing and that is the profits of the corporations that pay their bills.

This is a completely insidious group. They bait state legislators with trips to resort hotels in exotic areas to indoctrinate them with their rubber stamp bills. The state legislator who are members of ALEC are nearly 100% Republicans, right wing Republicans.

One thing that is evident about low level Republican operatives like state legislators is they are perfect candidates for personality worship. So they put these low level, petty, small minded state legislators with high-powered, slick, corporate individuals who craftily guide them to put together template bills in numerous legislative areas like education, environment, energy, health care, gun control, public lands and resources, etc.

But, the most insidious part of their activity is pushing these bill on the these state legislators to introduce into their state legislature. There are more then 70 bills in the education package alone. They encourage the legislators to submit as many of the bills as possible in each legislative session knowing that some of them will manage to get passed.

ALEC’s education agenda is pretty clear when you look at who makes up the education committee — all charter, private and online school promoters. Dominate institutions in the education committee is the Goldwater Institute from Arizona. They were the original promoter of Arizona’s charter school law. That law was so badly written and implemented that all kinds of scoundrels were able to get  charters and start schools.

I was involved with the whole charter school system early on in Arizona and directed a Montessori charter school in the late 90′s. I also served on the board of governors for a Montessori charter school in central Arizona for nearly eight years. So I have seen first hand how charter schools work.

The one constant that I have seen in Arizona charter schools is struggling to keep from going broke because the state provides so little money per student for charter schools. School districts can supplement the inadequacy of state funding by passing bond elections to add funds to their programs. Nearly every school district in Arizona has to supplemental funding in this way. But, charter schools don’t have that luxury. Much of their money goes into facilities and they pay their teachers in most cases far less than public teacher earn.

So this is part of what ALEC is pushing. It is a ways I believe the Arizona legislature pretends to be doing something good for education while cutting support for it. They also never have to hear about their lack of funding from charters because most of them are small programs without the clout or means to protest. But, large school districts can make their case in powerful ways that is difficult for legislators to avoid. But, small charter programs are just trying to survive and rarely speak up.

There is not doubt that education needs transforming. But, ALEC is not the organization to undertake such a role and its legislation should be shunned altogether because is has one end in mind — putting public educational funds into the hand of private educational hands. Once that happens, the whole accountability movement will end. And we will see an end to testing being used  to measure school effectiveness (or used to discredit schools and teachers). The private corporations will never tolerarte such scrutiny.

In all of this focus on education, there is very little concern about students. They just don’t care. They only care about getting control of our public money. Too, hell with what follows. They own the legislators and they are only accountable to their corporate overlords.

Below is the ALEC Education task force chairs and members (from ALEC Exposed):

Education Task Force

  • Co-Chair: Mickey Revenaugh (Co-Founder and Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Connections Academy)[59][60], Private Sector Chair.[58]Connections Academy is a division of Connections Education LLC, a private school based in Baltimore, MD that offers free online public school through contracts with charter schools, school districts, or governmental entities. The contracted schools have a lower graduation rate than traditional public schools.[61] Sylvan Ventures started Connections Academy in 2001. The company started its first schools in 2001, and in 2004, Connections Academy was sold to Apollo Management, L.P.[62] Apollo Management “has some $68 billion of assets under management, spread among its private equity, capital markets, and real estate segments. It specializes in buying distressed businesses and turning them around and has had some of its biggest successes investing during economic downturns,” according to its Hoovers profile.[63]
  • Staff Director: Dave Myslinski
  • Corporate Members include:
  • Politicians on the Education Task Force include:

Subcommittees

  • Special Needs Subcommittee[68]
  • Subcommittee on Science Fraud in the Classroom (or Subcommittee on Junk Science)[69]
  • Higher Education Subcommittee[70]
  • School Choice Subcommittee[70]
  • Working Group on Transparency (joint with the Tax and Fiscal Policy Task Force[70]
  • K-12 Education Reform Subcommittee[71]

The Attack on Public Schools

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In case you hadn’t noticed, there is a full on frontal attack on public schools taking place today. This attack has been going on for many years, but is just now being fully recognized for what it is.

It is being led by the Republican, right-wing ideologs and Christian fundamentalists. Initially the attack was being waged at the local level by groups taking over school boards and attempting to subvert the curriculum of the school, i.e., trying to outlaw teaching evolution or forcing a curriculum of creationism. Now the attack has moved to the state houses where governors are taking up the mantle of “reformers,” which is a very thinly veiled disguise for the complete give-away of public education to the purveyors of vouchers, charter, private and online schools.

What we see going on today is a systematic attempt to destroy public education through budget cuts and attacks on teachers and schools as incompetent and unfit to teach children. Nothing could be further from the truth. The need for schools reform is a completely trumped up excuse for dismantling the public system so it can be turned over to the greedy bastards who want the public money that is available. It is no different than turning the prison system over to private corporations or privatizing social security. No different. The greedy bastards are salivating as they ponder the money that comes with education.

First you convince the public how bad public education is with meaningless data that doesn’t actual mean what they say it means, then you discredit teachers as incompetent, badly trained and uncaring who are only protected by their worse unions and then you starve the “beast” of public education by with horrific budget cuts that drive parents and teachers away until there is only a carcass left that no one wants. Then you start giving public school buildings and all the public money to the private companies who come flying in like caped crusaders to save the day. They pretend to be benevolent and well meaning organization who end up cutting per pupil spending, teacher salaries, lowering standards and demanding facilities be paid for out of public money.

As their power grows and they maintain greater and greater influence over legislative bodies, they will start to charge more and more fees (haven’t we seen this scenario with financial institutions) until they will have the power in the legislatures to simply start charging tuition in addition to receiving public money.

And I can gaurentee you that student learning will not get better. But they will devise all kinds of faked data to show that it is improving.

P. L. Thomas, Ed.D., assistant professor of education at Furman University, writes in his article “Misreading the Achievement Gap:  A Tale of Bi-Partisan Failure,”tells us that school reformers beginning in the Reagan administration maintained such  a persistant clamor of failure that it has convinced Americans that their children and their schools are indeed failing.

In the beginning, the hysteria revolved around several points that were factually inaccurate, but publicly effective: (1) U.S. public schools were failing, (2) U.S. students were weak, and possibly lazy, but their schools didn’t do much to challenge them, and (3) because of this cycle of lazy students in failing schools, U.S. international competitiveness was in dire straits.

Among school reformers there is an insistance on focusing only on data that can be objectified, in other words, test scores. The causes of low test scores were only from two sources, bad or poor teachers and teaching and bad of poor schools. What was never acceptable as factors in student failure were parental, home environment or economic situations. Impacts of these conditions lead to what he calls an equity factor which is more important than the achievement factor.

He writes “acknowledging and addressing the equity gap recognizes that student test data are markers for a complex matrix of conditions—not simply the effort or aptitude of students, not the quality or effort of their teachers.”

He further states that “the achievement gap, then, serves the interests of the “no excuses” reform movement that is determined to discount the influence of poverty on the lives of children and their learning—not the interests of these children or families trapped in the growing plight of poverty in the U.S., and not universal public education as a mechanism of democracy and human empowerment.”

By focusing all their attention on the data or test scores they can discount the effect of other conditions outside of the classrooms and schools such as poverty, family and economic environments and make PUBLIC schools and PUBLIC school teachers the problem. Now the they don’t have to be accountable for or concerned with poverty and disperate socioeconomic conditions and dysfunctional families.

This push to privatize public education has been led for more than 20 years by the American Legislative Exchange Council by its corporate school members. (More on ALEC’s influence in education can be found in an article entitle ALEX Exposed: Starving Public Schools at the Parents United for Public Schools website.)

If the voters of this country continue to send Republican majorities to the state legislature and Washington, we will loose our public schools to the corporate marauders who will destroy public education, fill their coffers with public money and never deliver any sembolance of a decent education to the students of this country.