The American Legislative Exchange Council ALEC has been hard at work for decades. Its members are organized, well-funded and connected–too bad they aren’t using their powers to do what’s right for students and schools.Take Action ›Make sure your networks are in the know.
Instead, they use all their resources to push an agenda to open up the public school system to vouchers and privatization, lobbying legislators to restrict everything from voting rights to workers’ rights to help pave the path to their success.
Educator Dennis Van Roekel has an assignment for you: Learn all you can about how ALEC operates, so you’ll be prepared to protect your students and neighborhood schools. A good place to start is by watching the 30-minute documentary The United States of ALEC, featuring Bill Moyers.
Van Roekel, who now represents 3 million educators as president of the National Education Association, wrote this week on the Huffington Post that there are those who see public education as a potential profit center. In fact, Van Roekel wrote, “if just one percent of K-12 education spending were diverted to private profit, it would mean $5 billion a year in someone’s pockets.”
With an incentive like that, it will take the hard work of progressive groups and public school advocates to hold back the education privateers.
Read what else Van Roekel had to say about exposing ALEC’s agenda to pilfer funds from public education at the expense of students and schools.
Gov. Pat Quinn’s executive inspector general has opened an investigation into the politically influential United Neighborhood Organization’s use of a $98 million state grant for new charter schools, after a report in the Chicago Sun-Times that UNO gave millions of dollars in contracts for the schools to companies with ties to the organization’s top officials.
Executive Inspector General Ricardo Meza’s office asked the state Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity in a letter Feb. 14 to turn over all records regarding the grant, state officials disclosed Friday. More…
A financial analysis for 2012 of the British-based publishing giant Pearson is available online at 4-traders.com. It tells a very interesting, if frightening story that needs to be more widely circulated in the United States, especially among parents, teachers, and educational policy makers. Something consistently missing in a report that emphasizes growth and profit is students and whether Pearson’s high tech snake oil actually promotes student learning. Pearson is a money making machine, but is this education?
The headline summarizes the multi-page post. “Pearson accelerates global education strategy: Restructuring and investment in digital, services and emerging markets for faster growth, larger market opportunity and greater impact on learning outcomes.”
It is followed by “Financial highlights.” Sales were up 5 percent in 2012 to £6.1 billion or $9.21 billion, with “digital and services businesses contributing 50% of sales.” Operating profit in 2012 was £936 million or $1.4 billion. More…
Supporters say the charter school bill that has a good chance of passing Florida’s Republican controlled Legislature this year will better regulate charters and expand choices for parents.
One thing the bill won’t do is require the same evaluations for charter school teachers as traditional public school teachers. More…
An “off with their heads” joke caught on videotape by the boisterous president of the Chicago Teachers Union referring to robber barons is sparking criticism from the right.
Karen Lewis, in a speech at the Illinois Labor History Society’s “Salute to Labor’s Historic Heroes from the History Makers of Today,” compared labor’s current situation with a more violent time. More…
Public school teacher Sabrina Stevens opened a can of whoop-ass told off corporate lobbyists and lawmakers meeting secretly on Friday to discuss bills to eradicate public education.
Turning public schools over to corporations is just one of the many ways ALEC (the corporate dating service for state lawmakers) tries to lower our standard of living. Other favorites include union busting, strengthening monopolies and weakening consumer protections.
Stevens, who goes by the twitter handle @TeacherSabrina, made up credentials for herself and infiltrated the secret session. She hadn’t intended to speak out so forcefully. But she was so disgusted by what she heard that she stood up and told them what they’re doing isn’t legal:
I have a huge problem with how this process works, and I can tell you that those of us who have to live with these policies are not going to sit by quietly as you push them on other communities, on other schools and other students….
At youtube, Stevens explains a little more about what happened:
On November 30, 2012, I had the rare and deeply disturbing experience of witnessing part of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s Education Task Force meeting: a closed-door policy-shaping session open only to the state legislators who help to pass them, the corporate lobbyists who pay big money to shape and sponsor them– and scrappy activists like me, who are no longer willing to cede our policy-making processes to unaccountable, undemocratic organizations who hide from the people their decisions ultimately affect. Here’s me speaking from my heart as a teacher driven from the classroom into activism by destructive policies like theirs.
By the way, don’t you just love the condescending way the moderator calls her “Miss?” It captures the way they view all working people, not just teachers.
If the national movement to “reform” public education through vouchers, charters and privatization has a laboratory, it is Florida. It was one of the first states to undertake a program of “virtual schools” — charters operated online, with teachers instructing students over the Internet — as well as one of the first to use vouchers to channel taxpayer money to charter schools run by for-profits. More…
It is not news to anyone that the Republican Party hates public education, so much so that we can speak not only of a Republican War on Women, or a Republican War on Science, but of a Republican War on Education.
And, of course, there is always the concomitant Republican War on Government.
Our Founding Fathers wanted people educated. Schools followed westward the course of westward expansion and were as much a component of Manifest Destiny as the railroads.
The Republican Party wants to undo all that history. Everywhere we see the same push toward privatization that we see in other areas of government. Nirvi Shah, at Education Week, reported on the GOP’s plans for our education system following release of the Republican Party Platform: More…
In government, if I help myself to taxpayer dollars, we call that embezzlement and I go to jail. In the private sector, if I help myself to taxpayer dollars, we call that innovation and I get hailed as a visionary exponent of public-private partnership. That’s the lesson of a Nov. 17 investigation by Anne Ryman of the Arizona Republic into the state’s charter schools. More…
RT @capitolfax: I'm not sure what Gov. Quinn was thinking when he called this press conference. He provided no news and didn't really s ... 4 months ago
RT @BenYount: All you need to know about the chances for pensions in the House. Dan Biss, co-sponsor of the legislation, has left to go ... 4 months ago
