Deeply Unpopular, DeVos and ALEC in Lockstep in Trying to Destroy Public Education

The following article by Jennifer Berkshire was posted on the AlterNet website July 23, 2017:

Teachers, parents and business leaders are rising up to resist DeVos and ALEC’s extreme agenda.

Credit:  AP/Alex Brandon

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ speech to the American Legislative Exchange Council met with protests before she’d even arrived in Denver. But teachers and activists aren’t the only ones objecting to the extreme, anti-public education agenda DeVos shares with ALEC. One of the great questions of our time is just how far to the fringe the right wing of the Republican Party can march before the business-minded set steps in and yanks the chain. ALEC’s education platform is providing a real-time test case.

Virtually everything you need to know about ALEC’s education priorities is captured in the group’s most recent Report Card on American Education. Here, “forward-thinking” states like Arizona reign supreme thanks to a ranking system that prizes freedom from the education monopoly above all. Arizona’s high school graduation rate may be a full 25 percent lower than my own adopted home state of Massachusetts (languishing at #32 on the ALEC scale), but at least students aren’t choked by burdensome homeschooling regulations. In fact, thanks to far-sighted lawmakers like Arizona ALEC state chair Debbie Lesko (ALEC lawmaker of the year ’16), young Arizonans can now eschew school for a buffet of “a la carte learning options,” paid for with pre-loaded edu-debit cards, a vision DeVos regards as a model. Continue reading “Deeply Unpopular, DeVos and ALEC in Lockstep in Trying to Destroy Public Education”