Wisconsin legislator Chris Taylor reports from ALEC’s San Diego meeting.
“As if not to be undone, public education provokes as strong of ALEC ire as the EPA.
“Their strategy on privatizing public education continues to evolve, and is now more focused on co-opting middle-income families by convincing them that public schools are failing their children.
“Charter schools seem to be the current craze, perhaps because their private school voucher scheme, directed at low-income children, failed to increase academic performance as they promised. ALEC thinks they have their answer in the independent charter school scheme, which creates another school system that is publicly funded but unaccountable to any elected body and has no regulation or public oversight.
“We saw a mini charter school scheme in the latest Wisconsin budget, where the UW Regents and the Waukesha County Executive were given the power to authorize entities allow private charter schools to operate that received public monies.
“And ALEC is working on a bigger, more comprehensive model bill on the issue but two corporate ALEC members, virtual school king K12 (another conference sponsor) and the National Alliance for Public Charter schools (the representative who remarked about how active his group has been in Wisconsin) were having a rare public disagreement on the details.
“They were told to go off and work on it before the upcoming Education Task Force meeting.”
Read more here: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2015/07/12892/under-shroud-secrecy-and-security-alec-conference-gets-underway#.dpuf