Tag: American Legislative Exchange Council

Watchdog groups sound the gerrymandering alarm on ALEC’s ‘redistricting’ workshops

The American Legislative Exchange Council is hosting two redistricting workshops during its annual meeting next week.

The shadowy group responsible for crafting many of the Republican Party’s most extreme, far-right laws is holding panels on redistricting at its annual conference next week, a sign that the group may be taking part in the GOP’s efforts to gerrymander in 2021, according to open government experts.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is hosting two workshops during its annual meeting in Austin, Texas, teaching Republican legislators how they should navigate the redistricting process. Lawmakers in a number of GOP-controlled states gerrymandered congressional and legislative district lines at historic proportions the last time the maps were redrawn in 2011 in an attempt to insulate their control over state legislatures.

The two closed-door courses called “How to survive redistricting” and “What is redistricting and why must you do it?” will teach Republican legislators “the nuts and bolts” of redistricting, including the “legal aspects, the census process, demographic landscape and mapping process,” according to ALEC’s website. Lawmakers will also learn from “veterans of redistricting” about methodologies, resources, and strategies “to lead a successful redistricting cycle in your state.”

View the complete August 8 article by Danielle Mclean on the ThinkProgress website here.

DeVos continues carrying out ALEC’s agenda by dismantling for-profit college accountability

The following article by Brett Robertson was posted on the Media Matters website August 25, 2017:

In a little-noticed action, on August 18, the Department of Education announced a rule change that will further loosen accountability of for-profit colleges. The move signals a continuation of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ American Legislative Exchange Council-inspired agenda: favoring the interests of fraudulent for-profit colleges over victimized students, and dismantling higher education accountability structures.

In 2010, the administration of then-President Barack Obama announced new rules designed to ensure that for-profit career preparatory colleges yielded appropriate levels of “gainful employment” for their graduates. According to The Washington Post, the rule “effectively would shut down for-profit programs that repeatedly fail to show, through certain measures, that graduates are earning enough to pay down the loans taken out to attend those programs.” After a series of court challenges, and a process of negotiated rulemaking, the final guidelines were set to be instituted on July 1, 2017. Even before the rules were implemented, evidence indicated that the pending gainful employment regulations were already having an impact, with many colleges proactively shutting down programs that might have been noncompliant. Continue reading “DeVos continues carrying out ALEC’s agenda by dismantling for-profit college accountability”