Privatizing Public Education, Higher Ed Policy, and Teachers

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Increasing Profits for School Companies, Undermining Teachers, and Promoting "Conservatives" on Campus

Privatizing Public Education, Higher Ed Policy, and Teachers
This page reveals how ALEC bills would privatize public education, crush teacher's unions, and push American universities to the right. Among other things, 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?

How are corporations undermining K-12 public education in these bills?

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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:

To see a full list of these bills, click here.


ALEC bills and resolutions also attempt to change college education by:

To see a full list of these bills, click here.


This information is available to download as a two-page fact sheet here.

Some of this corporate agenda has already become law

Undermining Protections for Students With Disabilities

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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 or here.


The "Voucher" Strategy and Requiring Tax Subsidies for Private For-Profit Schools

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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-SB 22) and the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (AB 94). To learn more, click here.

Have any of these bills been introduced or enacted in YOUR state?


For an updated look at ALEC's education agenda in Wisconsin, see the Center for Media and Democracy's in-depth report, "ALEC Exposed in Wisconsin: The Hijacking of a State."


This information is available for download as a one-page fact sheet here.

Julie Underwood on ALEC & Education

Watch Julie Underwood, the eighth dean of the UW-Madison School of Education, discuss ALEC's school privatization agenda.

Watch other ALEC Exposed experts here.

Read Julie Underwood's article in The Nation here.

READ the "Model Bills" HERE

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Click here for a zip file of K-12 and higher education bills


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For a full list of individual bills from this section, click here


For descriptions of some of these bills, click here.

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.

Join the Conversation!

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