Last spring ALEC met in Kansas City. From a report on that meeting (recall that Kansas passed a corporate tax credit scholarship provision as part of HB 2506 in the final hours of the 2014 legislative session despite failing to pass out of committee):
“Why is a tax task force led by a cigarette lobbyist forming an education subcommittee? Perhaps to advance tuition ‘tax credit’ policies to subsidize charter and religious schools, a scheme dubbed ‘neo-vouchers’ by critics.
“‘With conventional vouchers, the state effectively bundles tax revenue and distributes it as vouchers. With neo-vouchers the taxpayer and the nonprofits play that role, while the state backfills the funding, reimbursing the taxpayer,’ says critic Kevin Welner, a University of Colorado-Boulder professor who wrote a book on the topic…These ‘neo-vouchers’ have been spreading across the country more quickly than traditional vouchers. The tax credit model provides a way to funnel taxpayer dollars to private schools with even less public accountability than with regular vouchers, and to bypass state constitutional provisions that have stood in the way of some state’s traditional voucher programs.” http://www.prwatch.org/news/2014/05/12463/corporate-interests-calling-shots-week-alecs-kansas-city-meeting