Ravitch comments on ALEC's reach into education

If you think citizens are in control of our government, think again.

Since the 2010 elections, when Republicans took control of many states, there has been an explosion of legislation advancing privatization of public schools and stripping teachers of job protections and collective bargaining rights. Even some Democratic governors, seeing the strong rightward drift of our politics, have jumped on the right-wing bandwagon, seeking to remove any protection for academic freedom from public school teachers.

This outburst of anti-public school, anti-teacher legislation is no accident. It is the work of a shadowy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Founded in 1973, ALEC is an organization of nearly 2,000 conservative state legislators. Its hallmark is promotion of privatization and corporate interests in every sphere, not only education, but healthcare, the environment, the economy, voting laws, public safety, etc. It drafts model legislation that conservative legislators take back to their states and introduce as their own “reform” ideas. ALEC is the guiding force behind state-level efforts to privatize public education and to turn teachers into at-will employees who may be fired for any reason. The ALEC agenda is today the “reform” agenda for education.

ALEC operated largely in the dark for years, but gained notoriety because of the Trayvon Martin case in Florida. It turns out that ALEC crafted the “Stand Your Ground” legislation that empowered George Zimmerman to kill an unarmed teenager with the defense that he (the shooter) felt threatened. When the bright light of publicity was shone on ALEC, a number of corporate sponsors dropped out, including McDonald’s, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Mars, Wendy’s, Intuit, Kaplan, and PepsiCo. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said that it would not halt its current grant to ALEC, but pledged not to provide new funding. ALEC has some 300 corporate sponsors, including Walmart, the Koch Brothers, and AT&T, so there’s still quite a lot of corporate support for its free-market policies. ALEC claimed that it is the victim of a campaign of intimidation.

Groups like Common Cause and colorofchange.org have been putting ALEC’s model legislation online and printing the names of its sponsors. They have also published sharp criticism of ALEC’s ideas. This is hardly intimidation. It’s the democratic process at work. A website called alecexposed.org has published ALEC’s policy agenda. Common Cause posted the agenda for the meeting of ALEC on May 11 in Charlotte, N.C. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards has dropped out of ALEC and also withdrawn from the May 11 conference, where it was originally going to be a presenter.

A recent article in the Newark Star-Ledger showed how closely New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s “reform” legislation is modeled on ALEC’s work in education. Wherever you see states expanding vouchers, charters, and other forms of privatization, wherever you see states lowering standards for entry into the teaching profession, wherever you see states opening up new opportunities for profit-making entities, wherever you see the expansion of for-profit online charter schools, you are likely to find legislation that echoes the ALEC model.

ALEC has been leading the privatization movement for nearly 40 years, but the only thing new is the attention it is getting, and the fact that many of its ideas are now being enacted. Just last week, the Michigan House of Representatives expanded the number of cyber charters that may operate in the state, even though the academic results for such online schools are dismal.

Who is on the education task force of ALEC? The members of the task force as of July 2011 are here. Several members represent for-profit online companies, including the co-chair from Connections Academy; many members come from for-profit higher education corporations. There is someone from Jeb Bush’s foundation, as well as right-wing think tank people. There are charter school representatives, as well as Scantron. And the task force includes a long list of state legislators, from Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Quite a lineup. Common Cause has asked why ALEC is considered a “charity” by the Internal Revenue Service and holds tax-exempt status, when it devotes so much time to lobbying for changes in state laws. Common Cause has filed a “whistleblower” complaint with the IRS about ALEC’s status.

The campaign to privatize the schools and to dismantle the teaching profession is in full swing. Where is the leadership to oppose it?

Post & Courier uncovers ALEC's reach in SC

Reporters Robert Behre and Stephen Largen have outdone themselves with an investigative report on the influence of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in the South Carolina legislature, and by extension, on the public policy governing the lives of millions of South Carolinians.

With extensive background reporting, complete narratives, examples and facts, Behre and Largen set a standard that I hope The State and other papers in South Carolina will emulate in their own coverage of ALEC -- when they get around to mentioning it.

Read it and weep.

Sen. Mike Rose stood up on the Senate floor earlier this month to clear confusion over a bill and asked for a delay so he could check with the measure’s creator.

But the proposal’s author wasn’t a fellow lawmaker or anybody in South Carolina.

“This is an American Legislative Exchange Council bill,” the Summerville Republican told his colleagues. “What I would like to do over the break is to do the research now with ALEC and address the senator from Orangeburg’s concerns.”

The moment provided a rare public outing of a little-known player in the state Legislature — a Washington-based, mostly corporate-funded nonprofit that pairs lawmakers across the country with business interests.

Since 1973, they have worked together in private — often at resort-hosted retreats — to craft proposed laws addressing everything from health care to education to gun laws and even voting rights.

Some corporations behind ALEC, among the largest companies in the country, stand to profit from passage of the group’s ready-made, model bills.

The group identifies itself as nonpartisan and working to advance free-market enterprise and limited government at the state level.

ALEC has Democratic members, including a few in South Carolina, but its bills most often line up with the GOP agenda.

The extent of ALEC’s influence in the Palmetto State is difficult to nail down, as there is no complete or definitive public tracking of just how many of its model bills have been introduced or passed here in some form over the years.

But the group’s bills are materializing at the Statehouse.

It’s rare for state legislators to publicly admit that a bill they sponsor is actually the work of ALEC, but the similarities between the group’s model bills and some introduced here are undeniable. Whole sections of some, with a few words changed, match ALEC models.

Some of ALEC’s member lawmakers say the bipartisan group provides useful assistance in weighing the impact of legislation on corporations and job creators, assistance not unlike the National Conference of State Legislatures.

But more often, critics say the group has taken on an increasingly conservative tilt. Some say ALEC provides corporations a way to influence lawmakers without it being reported to state ethics watchdogs.

“We feel that for a group like ALEC, a lot of how they make these bills is done in secret through corporate money and without public input,” said Liz Bartolomeo, a spokeswoman with the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based, nonpartisan group that advocates for government openness.
Voter registration bill

Charleston GOP Sen. Chip Campsen is an ALEC member and among the co-sponsors of the state’s controversial voter ID bill that passed last year.

The bill was signed into law by Republican Gov. Nikki Haley but subsequently blocked by the U.S. Justice Department, which said it discriminated against minorities.

The measure requires voters to bring a photo ID to the polls as a way to protect against fraud, bill supporters have said.

S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson sued the federal government, arguing the state’s voter ID law does not discriminate.

South Carolina was among a group of states to pass voter ID measures last year.

Language in many of the bills, including South Carolina’s, bears some similarities to ALEC’s model voter ID bill.

Earlier this month, after a fund- raiser in downtown Columbia for a national group that supports voter ID laws, Campsen said he developed his bill on his own without input from any organizations, including ALEC.

He said there could be a couple of reasons for similarities between the group’s model bill and his own. “Maybe people copied me,” he said.

But Campsen said it’s more likely ALEC copied laws from two other states whose voter ID measures have been upheld by the courts.

“I’ve introduced a lot of legislation in response to Supreme Court decisions, and that’s been my practice,” he said.

While the state waits for a resolution to Wilson’s lawsuit challenging the federal block, Campsen has introduced another measure that would impact voting rights.

Specifically, the bill would limit the types of IDs residents can use to register to vote.

Currently, state residents who want to register to vote must provide a valid photo ID or a copy of a current utility bill, bank statement, paycheck or government document that shows their name and address.

Campsen’s bill, titled the “Voter Citizenship Verification Act,” would limit acceptable forms of identification to a military ID, South Carolina or other state-issued ID, a birth certificate, naturalization documents or a passport.

The new measure, which has cleared a Senate panel, bears striking similarities to ALEC’s “Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act,” which lays out the same proposed requirements to register to vote.

The wording of the two bills also matches up closely in several sections.

Campsen did not respond to calls seeking comment on his new bill.

Another ALEC proposal that has passed in South Carolina was part of last year’s Fairness in Civil Justice Act.

That measure’s two-part trial, where a jury first determines compensatory damages, then punitive damages, is very similar to ALEC’s “Punitive Damages Standards Act.”

The interstate health care compact bill, which Rose identified on the floor of the Senate as ALEC-created, passed the Senate earlier this month.
How it works

Lawmakers pay $100 for a two-year membership in ALEC, but that makes up less than 2 percent of the group’s annual income. Most comes from corporate donations, conferences, advertising and publications.

Wait a second: Does this mean that WE, as taxpayers, pay the membership fee for these men and women to collect model legislation to use against us?

Can we not adopt a new law prohibiting the use of public funds to buy memberships in ALEC?

In return, lawmakers may attend a few meetings a year, such as its spring task force meeting set for May 11 in Charlotte. There, they break into committees with corporate members and work on model bills.

The elected officials’ expenses incurred attending meetings can be reimbursed by the group, or lawmakers sometimes pay their own way out of their campaign accounts.

“Why shouldn’t the private sector be able to sit at a table and discuss legislation that affects the country and them and people?” Rose asked. “The legislators that I know who are conscientiously trying to figure out what’s the best thing are using these organizations to obtain information. They’re certainly not a rubber stamp.”

Almost 2,000 lawmakers from all 50 states are members — about 25 percent — and ALEC bills itself as the nation’s largest nonpartisan individual membership association of state lawmakers. Its alumni include Haley and U.S. Rep. Tim Scott, R-North Charleston.

Rose likened ALEC to the National Conference of State Legislatures, a publicly-backed bipartisan group that also works on model bills.

State Rep. Liston Barfield, R-Conway, serves as a co-chair of ALEC in South Carolina and also as the secretary of its national board of directors.

Barfield said he first got involved with ALEC when he was a Democrat serving in the House in the 1980s.

“There’s no other organization that lets us hear what the business community is thinking,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we support them on every issue, but at least that gives us insight into what they’re thinking about and what is affecting their business.”

Respectfully, doesn't the state Chamber of Commerce do that? Really, the state chamber is well represented inside and outside the legislative chambers, and I would think that they have a chokehold on the best thinking of the state's business community, so no lawmaker has to look to any outside group for such expertise.

Nationally, ALEC claims more than a thousand of its model bills are introduced each year, and about 17 percent of them become law.

However, the group offers no full breakdown by state. Barfield said some of ALEC’s bills have become law in South Carolina, but, “I don’t have a list of them. I never sat down and tried to figure them out.”
Recent controversy

In recent weeks, ALEC has faced a crush of controversy in the wake of the fatal shooting of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla.

While the state waited more than six weeks to bring charges against neighborhood watch member George Zimmerman, who shot Martin, the national spotlight turned to Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law. That law allows people to use deadly force if they feel threatened in a public place.

When applied, as it was initially in the Martin case, those using deadly force are immune from prosecution. Zimmerman was charged later through a special prosecutor.

While Florida’s 2005 law did not stem from ALEC’s work, the group did create a model bill along the same lines that expands the so-called “Castle Doctrine” to areas outside a person’s home.

ALEC’s push for stand-your-ground laws has resulted in some groups calling for corporations to end their support for the group, with some success.

And last week ALEC announced it would focus solely on economic issues going forward.

But the group had been under growing scrutiny even before Martin’s death.

The Center for Media and Democracy, a Washington nonprofit critical of the group’s influence, recently received more than 800 previously secret ALEC model bills and then posted them on its website, providing a rare public glimpse of ALEC’s workings.

Brendan Fischer, a law fellow with the center, said the group hopes this new sunshine will increase voters’ awareness of the previously low-key group.

“They have this huge influence on the laws that govern us, but the public isn’t even allowed in. The press isn’t even allowed in,” he said. “It’s all happening without any public oversight or accountability.”

Fischer said part of the center’s concerns stem from how the corporations working through ALEC aren’t named on most lawmakers’ state ethics reports.

South Carolina lawmakers who have received grants and scholarships to attend ALEC events have declared them as ALEC donations on their campaign disclosure forms, but the names of the corporations themselves don’t appear there. “It’s layering influence on top of influence and it’s all happening outside the bounds of state ethics laws,” Fischer said.

Well, then, here's another opportunity to bring sunlight and transparency to the process: Let's adopt a new law requiring lawmakers to identify to corporate sources of their "grants and scholarships" whenever they attend conferences they don't pay to attend.

ALEC critics in South Carolina focus less on the ethics angle than what they see as an increasingly partisan edge to its model bills.

Sen. John Land, D-Manning, said he once contributed to ALEC when it hosted a meeting in Hilton Head. But he said the group now has lost its way. He cited its voter ID bill as “highly discriminatory and totally unnecessary.”

Such laws may seem beyond ALEC’s scope of pushing for limited government and free markets. But, Fischer said, “You could see how this would indirectly benefit big business because if you can reduce voter turnout in populations that tend to vote Democratic, you’re going to be more likely to have Republicans in office, and those Republicans are more likely to pass the kind of laws you want passed.”

Sen. Brad Hutto, D-Orangeburg, said he joined ALEC after first winning office in the mid 1990s but quickly left the group without attending a conference after discovering what he described as the group’s one-sided, conservative bent and one-size-fits-all approach.

But Sen. Thomas Alexander, a Walhalla Republican who serves with Barfield as state co-chair of ALEC, said the group is best understood as an educational tool.

“I just think it’s healthy to be involved and listen to ideas and listen to national trends and get together with colleagues,” he said, adding that even the National Conference of State Legislatures has its critics.

Rose, the GOP senator from Summerville, said ALEC’s role in formulating bills should not be voters’ prime concern.

“In the end, our Legislature passes or doesn’t passes legislation, so the origin of the legislation really doesn’t matter,” he said.

Respectfully again, I suggest the origin of legislation does matter.

When boneheaded proposals crop up before our committees and lawmakers, I want to be able to identify the proposal with the person who proposed it. If our lawmakers have to cull through an ALEC legislative catalog to find the proposals to resolve South Carolinians' issues and concerns, then maybe we need new lawmakers. After all, ALEC isn't on the ballot -- the men and women representing us in the legislature are.

Anderson Independent Mail weighs in against vouchers

The headline tells the tale: "Here we go again."

Editors of the Anderson Independent Mail, hometown newspaper to Rep. Brian White, chairman of South Carolina's House Ways and Means Committee, have issued their position on the newest-and-unimproved version of the voucher-and-tax-deduction bill sure to arise in the next couple of weeks.

Funding private education with public money via tax credits or other means has been a divisive issue in South Carolina for almost a decade. It continues to rear its head in each legislative session, usually aided by the same lawmakers who bring it up every year. And each session, it fails.

The current session should end on that same note.

Elegant simplicity.

The latest version, sponsored by Rep. Brian White, R-Anderson, and Rep. Eric Bedingfield, R-Greenville, was advanced by Ways and Means by a vote of 16-8, the Associated Press reports. Sixty lawmakers have signed on as sponsors. Parents will be able to take a $4,000 tax deduction per child for tuition paid, $2,000 for home-school expenses and $1,000 for parents who send their children to a public school outside the district.

The proposal won’t come up for consideration until after the budget debate, White said, and then just in negotiations after the Senate passes its spending plan. But it’s all been said before. The biggest difference in this plan is merely an accounting change: tax deductions rather than tax credits.

Donors to new nonprofits that give scholarships to poor and disabled students can claim tax credits for those donations. Yet few students will be helped by parents’ ability to claim tax deductions if paying for school up front isn’t possible, or if their child fails to qualify for a scholarship to help the donors’ tax liability. The two highlights of the proposal add up to just one thing: less money for public schools.

Only thing missing is the reference to the American Legislative Exchange Council, the right-wing organization that incubates bad ideas and distributes them to state legislators in the form of "model" legislation.

It's like buying a term paper: All you have to do is change the title, the page numbers, maybe edit the footnotes, and slap one's own name at the top. Voila!

Over the years millions of dollars in out-of-state money rolled in — and will likely continue to roll in — to advance school choice via contributions to political campaigns.

It’s not about advancing education. Why should out-of-state donors care about South Carolina’s children? Apparently some lawmakers don’t; why expect a stranger to?

When funding for public education is diverted to private education, we all lose. Why is it so difficult for some lawmakers to grasp that an educated populace, regardless of whether the taxpayer has a child in the system, is vital to the state overall, both economically and with respect to business development?

Instead of looking for ways to take money from the public schools — after already sending our per-pupil spending to levels of more than a decade ago — we should be looking more closely at ways to help public-school students thrive. While that doesn’t mean more money is the answer, it insults us all when political motivations are disguised as being “for the children.”

White’s proposal is somewhat cheaper than past versions, according to the AP, but one glaring omission in his plan is there is no proposal on how to pay for it, nor how to make up the estimated $37 million reduction in state revenues in one year alone.

If the people funding all this legislative push to further damage public education ever deign to visit South Carolina, let’s be sure to show them the truth: overcrowded classrooms, demoralized teachers and thousands of students who are tacitly being told they’re not as important as they — and their parents — always hoped.

Thank you, editors, thank you.

One more thing and then we’ll descend from this familiar soapbox for the day. Democrats, reports The State newspaper, “argued that the legislation lacks accountability. Republicans countered that parents would hold the schools they choose accountable on their own.”

Unlike in public education, however, teachers and administrators in private schools don’t have to listen. And, despite any personal convictions about education, by law they don’t even have to care.

Wisconsin lawmaker explains ALEC's position on education

Can't add much to this analysis. Listen for notes that will sound similar to the coming legislative debate on vouchers in South Carolina.

FL lawmaker IDs her puppeteers; who pulls our strings?

This would be comical if it wasn't so important.

Remember: The difference between citizens and elected lawmakers is that lawmakers have the Constitutional authority to make laws that govern the rest of us, and to raise and spend funds (or not) to honor the state's commitments to its people.

Across the country, there are state lawmakers who choose not to do the people's bidding, but choose instead to do the bidding of a corporate-funded ideological interest group called the American Legislative Exchange Council. I've mentioned the crowd before.

Last week, in Florida, a young woman in the State House slipped up and revealed that she takes her orders from ALEC:

Progressives have long tried to expose the influence the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) wields in state house across the country, but one Florida lawmaker is making it too easy.

Funded almost entirely by large corporations, ALEC produces “model legislation” favorable to industry that state lawmakers can introduce as their own bills. Usually, the legislators tweak the language of the bills to make them state-specific or to obfuscate their origins. Usually, but apparently not always.

In November, Florida state Rep. Rachel Burgin (R) introduced a resolution that would officially call on the federal government to reduce corporate taxes, but she apparently forgot to remove ALEC’s mission statement from the top of the bill, which she seems to have copied word-for-word from ALEC’s model bill.
...
As the government transparency group Common Cause reports, “Burgin quickly withdrew the bill hoping that no one had noticed and then re-introduced it 24-hours later, with a new bill number (HM 717), but now without the problematic paragraph.” Apparently no one noticed until this week.

While it’s no secret by now that conservative lawmakers in state capitals everywhere have used ALEC’s legislation to tear down environmental and labor regulations, curb voting rights, and coordinate a business-friendly agenda nationwide, it’s rare to see it on display so clearly.

Her accidental revelation caught the attention of her constituents:

Citizens decry the involvement of shadowy special interests and lobbying groups in our politics, so it's quite surprising that Rep. Rachel Burgin, a Republican from Tampa, tried to pass the actual mission statement of such a group into law.

It's not exactly a secret that lawmakers often don't actually write the laws they introduce. Sometimes they rely on aides, but sometimes they just pretty much copy and paste language pre-written for them by outside groups. Most, however, aren't as lazy about it as Burgin.

Burgin introduced a bill written by the American Legislative Exchange Council (more on what that is later), but she made one mistake. She forgot to delete a portion that included the groups mission statement. Yes, she tried to introduce the following language into the Florida statutes:

"WHEREAS, it is the mission of the American Legislative Exchange Council to advance Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism, and individual liberty..."

Burgin realized her mistake, pulled the bill, and reintroduced it under a different number 24 hours later, but not before Common Blog found the mistake.

So, yes, Burgin had introduced a bill that was written word-for-word by ALEC, but what exactly is ALEC? It describes itself as "a nonpartisan membership association for conservative state lawmakers," and boasts that about a third of state legislators across the country are members. However, state lawmakers aren't the only members. The group boasts several corporate members.

"Through the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council, global corporations and state politicians vote behind closed doors to try to rewrite state laws that govern your rights," claims the site ALEC Exposed. "These so-called 'model bills' reach into almost every area of American life and often directly benefit huge corporations."

How much influence exactly the corporate members have over the bills that are crafted, and the group claims that corporate members get no vote on which model bills the group adapts.

Regardless, Burgin's dumb mistake inadvertently gave Floridians a clearer peak into how our legislative sausage is made.

However, it shouldn't be much of a surprise that Burgin isn't writing her own legislation. She doesn't have much of a proper education in the law. The 29-year-old majored in biblical studies at the Moody Bible Institute.

And it has drawn attention to the lawmaker's curious background, and the route she took to her seat in the legislature.

Politicians like Rachel Burgin are the exact reason Americans no longer have faith in the institutions of government. After working as a legislative aide, Burgin made enough corporate friends to get herself elected to the Florida State House in 2008. At 25, Burgin was elected to the statehouse two years prior to completing college. Her voting record shows a propensity for the conservative extreme.

Do we have anyone in South Carolina who fits this description?

Do we have any South Carolinians in our legislature carrying ALEC's water, and doing its bidding?

And what exactly is ALEC's interest in our states, and why should that matter to us?

With some justification, you might ask why this really matters: even if this bill passed it wouldn’t force Congress to act. However, I think it matters because the states play a very significant role in setting the national agenda. Corporations know this, which is why they frequently use ALEC to secretly introduce their model bills, creating the impression of widespread popular uproar in the state houses. In recent years they have used this mechanism for both attacks on the EPA’s regulation of greenhouse gases (ALEC bill introduced in 22 states) and in pushing back against the Affordable Care Act (ALEC bill introduced in 44 states).

It also matters because the question of whether corporations should pay more or less in tax is an issue that gets to the heart of politics in America. Common Cause board chair Robert Reich writes about this tension between corporate influence and America’s economic trajectory in an op-ed published in today’s Chicago Tribune.

Rep. Burgin’s (revised) bill to reduce corporate taxes has already been voted out of the Federal Affairs Subcommittee, and is due to have a hearing in the State Affairs Committee soon. Only one external voice was heard at the subcommittee hearing, a lobbyist from the Associated Industries of Florida (AIF), a lobby group who themselves have links to ALEC. AIF is now run by notorious ex-Congressman and Florida Speaker Tom Feeney, who not only was caught up in the Jack Abramoff scandal, but was once named one of the “20 Most Corrupt Members of Congress” by the organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

It matters who writes our laws and it matters who stands to benefit from them. When these are the very same entity, then we as citizens should have the right to know this.

So, who has ALEC assigned to South Carolina?

Richland 2 social studies teacher wins national award

It's good to see a South Carolina public school teacher honored for doing great work.

It could be a daily occurrence, given that South Carolina public school teachers work miracles every school day. But South Carolina doesn't honor its miracle-working public school teachers; it browbeats them, adds greater burdens to their backs and begrudges them every dime appropriated for their substandard salaries, shrinking health insurance benefits and meager retirement benefits.

Yes, God bless the public school teachers who live and work in right-to-work-for-less states like ours.

And congratulations to social studies teacher Jason Yaman, whose work drew the attention of an organization beyond our borders.

“What I love about history is telling the stories and making the connections as to how this caused that,” said Yaman, who has been with Richland 2 since 2002.

But that passion for history wasn’t always something shared by his students, who would often come to class with a negative view of the subject.

“That was a real area of growth for me,” he said. “I enjoyed social studies so I thought everyone did. As it turns out, I couldn’t have been more wrong.”

After attending various education conferences, which included information on how the brain processes information, Yaman began thinking about the way we learn.

“There is brain research out there that supports that we think visually,” he said.

For the benefit of lawmakers, let me explain. After graduating high school and earning baccalaureate, and often advanced, degrees in college, and qualifying for certification as a public school educator under the laws of South Carolina and the policies of its Department of Education, these public school teachers often attend conferences, seminars, workshops and trainings that are designed to offer "professional development."

"Professional development" represents the philosophy that human beings are life-long learners, and that we have an infinite capacity to learn, grow and improve in our professions over the course of a career. So long as a good educator remains active, that good educator wants to know what more is being discovered about the many different aspects of teaching and learning.

Physicians and attorneys, and a great many other professionals, understand the same thing: You cannot rest on the belief that you know all there is to know about your field of work, or you'll stagnate and lose your effectiveness. Hence, physicians and attorneys attend their own professional development conferences and events.

This is why education professionals ought to be supported in attending as many of these occasions as possible.

Let's be clear: "Professional development" events are not the same as vacations or junkets, such as when corporate entities plan golfing getaways for lawmakers in the Caribbean, where they can "consult" on major issues of the day over the fourth hole. And they're not the same as when lawmakers attend conferences of the American Legislative Exchange Council, to network with like-minded conspirators and receive this year's sheaf of viral legislation.

Instead, "professional development" helps education professions get better at doing what they do, and become more effective in the classroom. For example, the award-winning social studies teacher, Mr. Yaman, learned about developments in brain research, and his new awareness led him to devise new teaching strategies that reflect the latest research.

In a nutshell, Yaman’s approach takes the state-adopted history textbook and guides students through it using pictures. He says he wants to get away from the idea that history is just memorizing dates and facts and “cramming before tests.”

“I tell them you need to have the timeframe of history,” Yaman added, “not the timeline.”

Tuesday, students were asked to draw images of what the Japanese thought of an American battleship when it was first spotted off the coast of that island nation in the late 1700s.

Students drew dragons and erupting volcanoes, as accounted in a letter by a Japanese fisherman that Yaman read out loud in class.

Over the years, Yaman said as he has developed and adjusted his style, he has seen a difference in the way his students respond.

“I think they go into the test with better recall,” he said.

Do you see this? As a result of professional development, a teacher devised new teaching strategies, and these strategies are yielding greater results in student achievement. Investment made, dividend collected.

That's how education works.

It must be working.

In January, Yaman was presented with the Beveridge Family Teaching Award at the American Historical Association’s national conference in Chicago, an award he shares with another teacher from Ohio. Established in 1995, the award is given to recognize excellence and innovation in teaching history.

Blythewood Middle School Principal Brenda Hafner said it’s an approach that’s “infectious.”

“These are the things we look for in all of our teachers but particularly how do you ignite that passion for learning,” she said. “It’s how do you encourage students to dig deeper, or delve further, and Jason is able to do that. You can’t help but feel it when you’re in the room.”

Look at that. Great teaching and learning is "infectious." Isn't that what we want in all of South Carolina's classrooms?

Isn't it?

Dusten Asplin who has sketched a fairly decent dragon on his computer screen, said he enjoys drawing in “Mr. Yaman’s class.”

The pictures, the 12-year-old said, have helped him remember his history lessons.

“It helps me to learn,” he says.

Of course it does.

Thanks, Mr. Yaman.

Who has ALEC assigned to lead South Carolina?

Today, South Carolina's lawmakers reconvened in Columbia to take up pressing issues of the day. One thing that should be addressed quickly is undoing Governor Nikki Haley's Orwellian order that public employees answer their telephones with "It's a great day in South Carolina." While unemployment is still above 11 percent and South Carolina still can't afford to fully fund its meager commitment to public schoolchildren, it may not be such a great day for everyone yet.

Another thing to watch for is the influence of the American Legislative Exchange Council on this year's session. Thanks to a lot of alternative media coverage in recent months, encouraged in part by the Occupy movements around the country, ALEC has been unmasked as the root of a lot of ultra-conservative -- and anti-public-education -- legislation in many state legislatures.

At a recent ALEC meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona, a reporter was booted for daring to cover the organization's activities. If this was a private company gathering, there'd be no problem with an expectation of privacy. But ALEC is made up of state lawmakers -- people on the public payroll -- and it generates legislation that these lawmakers take back to their states, including here in South Carolina. Shouldn't that qualify as public business?

I’m here to learn more about this increasingly muscular organization, formally an educational non-profit — and one that shuns the “L” word, lobbyist. It puts state lawmakers together with representatives from some of the country’s most powerful corporations to advance their legislative agendas. And it’s the most influential organization the majority of Americans have never heard of.

As the coming federal election sucks all the oxygen out of America’s political room, it’s easy to ignore the power of the states, and the changes that are quietly taking place across the country independent of — and often hostile to — the federal government. But, for understanding grassroots America, ALEC, here in God’s golf country, is a good place to start.

In the words of its manifesto, “ALEC provides its public- and private-sector members with a unique opportunity to work together to develop policies and programs that effectively promote the Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism and individual liberty.”

And the success of its efforts is in little doubt.

By its own record, it has created an arsenal of about 800 “model” bills, templates or blueprints for future laws. They are tabled about 1,000 times a year across the country; about one in five are passed.

Some 2,000 state legislators belong to the organization...

So, which of South Carolina's lawmakers are members of ALEC? ALEC won't publish its list of members who are public elected officials, although they are public elected officials. That makes it difficult to know for sure.

To the ...growing number of media and non-governmental organizations who study it closely, ALEC is a factory for legislative bills that replicate across the 50 states, with the aim of undercutting the public sector and the role of government and promoting free-market policy at state level, where it often counts the most.

ALEC-backed provisions have opposed climate change legislation and environmental regulation, stoked the effort to privatize prisons and schools, pushed for rollbacks of workers’ rights, for limited voting rights and tax breaks for the wealthy. The results, critics say, line the pockets of corporations — a charge ALEC and its defenders insist is misrepresenting its operating style.

“The benefits of ALEC are that you don’t have to walk through 50 different legislatures,” says Jeff Reed, an Indiana “school choice” advocate who campaigns for developing alternatives to the public school system. “You can share ideas with everyone in the same room. But the people in the room are not in lockstep.”

But ALEC’s very success in advancing its policies has sparked a backlash in states such as Ohio and Wisconsin, where police and firefighters joined protests against anti-union legislation.
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“When a company needs a state bill passed,” writes the far-from-radical Bloomberg Businessweek, “the American Legislative Exchange Council can get it done.”

ALEC officials routinely deny it, insisting that in this “laboratory of democracy” lawmakers, not corporations, have the final word on the bills that emerge for approval: if companies have a hand on the legislative tiller, it is not the upper hand.

If it's elected officials who organize themselves and put on these conferences, why aren't they open to the public? It seems a fair question. If it's not elected officials who do this work, then who really pays for these events?

The group’s 300-strong corporate members include some of the most high-profile in America: among them AT&T, Wal-Mart, GlaxoSmithKline, UPS, Pfizer, Bayer, Verizon, and Koch Industries — headed by the Kansas-based billionaire brothers nicknamed “the Kochtopus” for their wide-ranging financial and ideological influence.

Corporate giants? What interest do they have in influencing public policy, especially when it has to do with public education?

Inside the hotel’s vast conference wing all is calm and bright, in spite of the numerous vigilant security guards. ...Conference tables are strewn with soberly titled reports by right-wing think tanks allied with ALEC: the Heritage Foundation, the Goldwater Institute, the Franklin Center, the Tax Foundation and more.

They explain how poor states can become richer by cutting taxes, how retiree health benefits can be reined in, how “school choice” can create private alternatives to education.

And how did they come to get involved in public education?

Born in 1973, to a group of conservative state lawmakers and policy wonks, ALEC can’t claim the provenance of the Founding Fathers. But after a modest beginning during President Richard Nixon’s term, and a slow ascendancy, it became a resounding hit in recent years, backed by corporate heft.

Now thousands of the elect and the elected head for its conferences, the latter assisted by ALEC’s “scholarship” funds. Some join the nine task forces and legislative boards that create template bills, alongside similar bodies set up for their corporate counterparts. The final vote, ALEC says, has no input from the corporations. (Critics, unsurprisingly, say otherwise. “Through ALEC, behind closed doors, corporations hand state legislators the changes to the law they desire that directly benefit their bottom line,” says the watchdog Center for Media and Democracy.)

If ALEC doesn't reveal the names of members who are elected officials, maybe reporters in South Carolina's capital press corps can find out.

Or, we could wait to see who files the same bills that are being filed in dozens of other states, word for word, and we'll know.