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Here’s a chart showing multiple ALEC education bills were introduced in Kansas and other states in 2013. These bills are not organic solutions for issues in Kansas but are part of a national agenda to de-fund public education and divert precious resources to schools that don’t serve all children and the private and corporate interests behind them, while at the same time weakening teachers’ unions. We note this list is under-inclusive as Kansas’ Innovative School District legislation is missing as well as the mis-named Payroll Protection Act which appears on a different chart but applies to teachers as...

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...

ALEC recently met in Washington, D.C. Did your legislator attend? A few years ago, we had never heard of ALEC. Here’s some background. Listen to some of the discussion on education at the 11:45 and 23:22 points: http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-united-states-of-alec-a-follow-up/...

This is food for thought as we look ahead to the 2015 legislative session. We have heard talk of eliminating teacher collective bargaining and tying teacher compensation to standardized test scores on top of last year’s removal of due process protections for teachers. We’re also hearing of increasing numbers of districts facing teacher shortages. “But the belief that [getting rid of ‘bad apples’] will transform education is a fantasy, a fairy tale that conceals the true nature of the problem. In reality, fixing education will take much more than a change of personnel…[T]he key to improving teaching is...