The world behind the world behind the scenes

In the realm of legislation, there are at least three layers. The most visible to the public is the one in which votes are taken and laws adopted. Behind the scenes of that world is another in which deals are made and votes traded.

That is the layer most people think of when they hear the quote usually attributed to Otto von Bismarck, “Laws are like sausages – it’s best not to see them being made.” The idea of legislators basing their votes on the currency of favors and promises can make the public queasy. It’s an inelegant and gritty system, but it grinds out laws like sausage and keeps the machinery of government functioning.

But there is at least one other world, deeper in the legislative shadows, that can have a much greater impact than petty cloakroom horse trading. That is the world in which the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, operates.

ALEC, as Matt Reichel reports in this post, is “a conduit between corporate boardrooms and elected officials willing to enact their agenda of austerity and privatization.” ALEC’s agenda is to simultaneously reduce the tax burden on its corporate sponsors and to channel what government funds remain into their corporate coffers.

ALEC creates model legislation that benefits its members, including, Reichel writes, “prison privatization, stripping collective bargaining rights, reducing or eliminating environmental protections, and enacting regressive tax laws.”

Also looming large on ALEC’s agenda is a corruption of the charter school movement to enrich corporate providers.

One example is Act 417 of the 2011 Louisiana legislature, which was written “to provide for enrollment preferences and membership on the governing or management board of a charter school for certain major corporate donors; and to provide for related matters.”

Note that charter school expansion benefitting corporate providers, prison privatization, regressive tax laws and an attack on collective bargaining rights all figure prominently in this year’s legislative session as well.

Maybe – just maybe – ALEC has gone too far in its underground campaign to raid the public treasury and turn our nation in to a corporate plutocracy. Jamie Lorber, a reporter for Roll Call on Washington, DC’s Capitol Hill, writes here that some of ALEC’s sponsors are reconsidering their support.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has withdrawn support for ALEC. Kraft Foods, Coca-Cola and Intuit have also announced that they are pulling back from ALEC.

The reason why should bring a smile to all true believers in small-d democracy. An African-American civil rights group, Color of Change, has campaigned relentlessly for corporations to sever their ties to ALEC.

Color of Change, writes Lorber, went after ALEC because of its model legislation opposing voter ID laws:

“Civil rights activists say the laws disproportionately target minority, student and elderly voters, who tend to vote Democratic, and could bar up to 5 million voters from the polls this fall…Color of Change Executive Director Rashad Robinson said the group is using Internet appeals to pressure companies that have made explicit efforts to build a strong relationship with African-American customers.”

It’s a good sign that people aren’t completely powerless in the face of the corporate juggernaut. If you’d like to join Color of Change’s campaign to separate ALEC from its corporate sponsors, click here.

Teacher tenure is under attack

No doubt about it, an orchestrated attack on teacher tenure is underway in Louisiana.

As previously reported in EdLog, a staff member of the Associated Professional Educators of Louisiana (A+PEL) is running for the state board of education on a platform of abolishing tenure. "We need to get rid of it as soon as we possibly can," says Holly Boffy, a former teacher of the year and A+PEL's director of professional development and university programs.

Then there's business bigshot Lane Grigsby, who promised financial support to candidates who will oppose teacher tenure.

Now comes this article by Advocate reporter Will Sentell, who lays out the basic argument that tenure opponents will use: Not enough teachers have been fired to suit them; therefore, tenure must be abolished.

Not surprisingly, the abolition of tenure is also being pushed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a corporate-dominated lobbying group that opposes worker rights and supports privatizing public services.

Sentell's article focuses on the fact that "only 52 tenured teachers were fired statewide in connection with their evaluations over a 10-year period starting in 2000."

LFT President Steve Monaghan sarcastically asked the reporter, “What would be the number I need in terminations that would make people think that the system is working?”

In all seriousness, we should hope that there would be few terminations of tenured teachers. Tenure ought to be considered a guarantee of teacher quality. Here's why.

In order to earn tenure, a teacher must have college degree and pass a rigorous national examination called Praxis. For the next three years, the teacher undergoes constant supervision and professional development. In those three years, a teacher can easily be terminated for any legitimate reason. It is the responsibility of administrators to ensure that teachers who make it through the process deserve tenure.

During that time, about half of all prospective teachers leave the profession. This weeding-out process is the real reason that so few tenured teachers are found to be incompetent.

Once it is earned, tenure is not a guarantee of lifetime employment. Teachers must still undergo regular professional development and periodic evaluations. Tenure merely guarantees that a teacher cannot be fired unless a fair process is followed.

In Sentell's article, one principal whines that tenure hearings are "tedious" and that "I felt like I was the person on trial."

Well, yes. The purpose of a tenure hearing is to determine the facts. If a principal alleges that a teacher is incompetent, the teacher has a right to question the accuser. Otherwise, we would return to the bad old, good-old-boy days when who a teacher knew was much more important that what a teacher knew and could bring to a classroom.

LFT leader exposes corporate agenda for education

A corporate funded organization that writes model legislation for state lawmakers was exposed for its anti-public education, anti worker and anti-democratic agenda at a press conference in New Orleans Wednesday. LFT Vice President Jim Randels, who is a member of the United Teachers of New Orleans, was one of the speakers at the press conference.

Randels was joined by Orleans Parish School Board member Brett Bonin and several others, each of whom brought to light a part of the agenda espoused by the American Legislative Exchange Council, which is holding its national convention in New Orleans this week. Bonin, along with LFT and others, is a member of the Coalition for Louisiana Public education.

One of ALEC's stated legislative priorities is to privatize public education, making education a profit center rather than a public good. That, Randels noted, "is dangerous to the American way and to the education of our children."

“The ALEC way turns parents into consumers shopping for schools rather than citizens building high quality public schools,” Randels said. “ALEC’s privatization, profit model wants parents to be consumers. But America needs parents to be citizens.”

“Education policy must be based on best practices and what is in the best interests of children not a profit driven corporation and a legislator meeting in secret,” Randels said.

The profit motive behind ALEC’s agenda for public education thwarts the ideals of public education and democracy, Randels said.

“In ALEC world, schools would become private entities funded by public money. As a taxpayer, I would have no voice in the way public schools are run. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to return to an era of taxation without representation.

“We should be working together to do away with separate and unequal schools, to ensure that taxation without representation does not return, to nurture citizens rather than create consumers, to work for the public good rather than for private profit,” Randels concluded.

Read the rest of this story - click here.

Exposed: How big business brings bad ideas to the legislature

When protesters greet members of the American Legislative Exchange Council at their annual convention in New Orleans on Wednesday, it will probably be the first time that most Louisianians have heard of the organization.


ALEC probably likes it that way. Despite the non-threatening sound of its name, the group is behind some of the worst public policy initiatives ever introduced in state legislatures.

Vouchers for private and religious schools, attacks on teacher tenure, watering down special education rules and stripping local school boards of authority to charter schools are all ideas promulgated by ALEC.

But its not just education. From privatizing prisons to stripping worker rights, ALEC has a bag full of model legislation that it pushes in state legislatures across the nation.

As it turns out, ALEC is funded by huge corporations that have a vested interest in changing state laws to siphon public money into corporate pockets. To read more about ALEC's nefarious schemes, click here to access the Center for Media and Democracy's "ALEC Exposed" Web site.

The current president of ALEC is Louisiana State Representative Noble Ellington. He, along with a handful of other Louisiana lawmakers, are being treated to the convention by Louisiana taxpayers.

That's right. Our tax dollars are paying for state lawmakers to attend a convention where they will learn how to send more of our tax dollars straight to the corporations that sponsor the convention.

As the Lafayette Advertiser pointed out in this editorial, we are paying for our legislators to be lobbied on behalf of big business: "ALEC represents the expenditure of private money to influence the political and legislative process, and that makes it lobbying. And the state government has no business picking up the tab for it, whether it's lobbying from the left, the right, corporations, unions, up, down, backwards or forwards."

Commenting on the corporate greed that can warp a capitalist system, former Soviet Union Premier Nikita Kruschev once said, “You will sell us the rope that we will hang you with.”

In Louisiana, it appears that citizens are paying for the scissors that will be used to shred the fabric of our society.