Privatizing Public Education and Changing College Education
The bills on this page demonstrate how bills supported by ALEC corporations privatize public education, crush teacher's unions, and push American universities to the right. These bills make education a private commodity rather than a public good, and reverse America’s modern innovation of promoting learning and civic virtue through public schools staffed with professional teachers for children from all backgrounds. Through ALEC, corporations have both a VOICE and a VOTE on specific state laws to change the American education system. Do you?
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Learn MORE about the "Model Bills" ALEC Corporations Are Backing to Rewrite YOUR Rights
The Center for Media and Democracy analyzed the bills ALEC politicians and corporations voted for. More analysis is available below and also at ALEC Exposed's sister sites, PRWatch and SourceWatch.
How are corporations undermining K-12 public education in these bills?
Through ALEC, corporations, ideologues, and their politician allies voted to spend public tax dollars to subsidize private K-12 education and attack professional teachers and teachers' unions by:
Promoting voucher programs that drain public schools of resources by using taxpayer dollars to subsidize private school profits, and specifying that those schools must remain unregulated. Voucher programs have been pushed in the following ways:
Back-dooring privatization by creating voucher programs to subsidize unregulated, for-profit schools or religious schools for specific subsets of students, such as foster children, or children of military families.
Evading requirements under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) by preying on parents of children with special needs through subsidies for unproven and profit-driven private schools, which are not covered by the IDEA. (See this bill, this bill, and this bill.) Nearly identical bills have been introduced in Wisconsin and other states.
Segregating students with disabilities from non-disabled students by incentivizing the creation of largely unregulated private schools for students with disabilities, and then allowing private schools to refuse children's admission such that the private testing/evaluation scores can be higher than for public schools that must take all students, regardless of aptitude.
Certifying individuals with no education background as teachers, a move that would weaken the quality of education, that fails to recognize there is more to teaching than knowledge of a subject, and that would undermine the role and competitiveness of professional teachers (see also this bill).
Eliminating tenure for teachers in favor of "performance," allowing districts to fire older teachers in favor of lower-cost young teachers.
Undermining teacher's unions indirectly through the above bills, and directly through bills like this one, this one, and this one. See also the anti-union bills on the Worker Rights page.
ALEC bills and resolutions also attempt to change college education by:
Promoting right-wing ideology in public universities through the Academic Bill of Rights, a document supported by extremist David Horowitz. See also here.
Subsidizing private universities by offering taxpayer-funded vouchers to for-profit and religious institutions of higher education,
Treating universities like manufacturers and setting aside significant portions of the legislature's higher education budget to reward institutions for students who complete courses and graduate in greater numbers at lower per-unit expense.
Some of this corporate agenda has already become law
Undermining Protections for Students With Disabilities
The ALEC Special Needs Scholarship Act has been introduced in Wisconsin as AB 110 by Rep. Michelle Litjens, and co-sponsored in the Senate by Leah Vukmir, who was an ALEC "Legislator of the Year" in 2009.
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction said:
This bill strips special education students of due process rights and rights to services. It allows for the segregation of students based on disability. It will devastate funding for public education in select districts. It will result in the largest expansion of private school regulation ever seen in Wisconsin and, at the end of the day, no one will have any data to show if it resulted in a better education.
To read more about this story, click here or here.
The "Voucher" Strategy and Requiring Tax Subsidies for Private For-Profit Schools
For almost 20 years, a top priority item for ALEC has been the privatization of public schools through school vouchers. Like many ALEC efforts, this one was first implemented in Wisconsin. ALEC has dozens of bills related to this topic, along with books and analysis. in 1993, ALEC gave its first "Adam Smith Free Enterprise Award" to school privatization advocate and funder Richard DeVos. In the early 1990s, under the leadership of longtime ALEC member Tommy Thompson, Wisconsin was the first state in the nation to implement a voucher program using public funds to send children to private schools. This experiment was limited to low-income students in the Milwaukee School District. Although recent tests have revealed that voucher students performed worse in math and reading than public school students, ideological proponents of privatization are nonetheless pushing to expand the Milwaukee program to other areas of the state, as well as to higher-income families.
Tracking the ALEC school voucher agenda, Governor Walker's 2011 Wisconsin budget expanded voucher schools throughout Milwaukee County and to the Racine school district, lifted the cap on participation, and increased income eligibility to 300% of the federal poverty level. Other ALEC-originated school choice bills are also in the works for Wisconsin, including the Charter School Reform Bill (AB 51-SB2) and the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (AB 94). To learn more, click [(LINK) here].
Have any of these bills been introduced or enacted in YOUR state?
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