Tweet
This article was originally published by the Center for Media and Democracy at PRWatch.org.
The national certifying body for teachers in the United States, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), participated in the Education Task Force of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) until April 2012. In an official statement sent to the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) today, NBPTS spokesperson Brian Lewis said,
Given recent events, the new NBPTS President and CEO decided to discontinue engagement with ALEC. As a result, NBPTS terminated its membership as an Education Task Force Member of ALEC effective April 18, 2012, and also withdrew from participating in the upcoming ALEC conference. . . . The decision to participate in ALEC had been made by previous NBPTS leadership.
Although primarily a non-profit organization focusing on teacher certification, NBPTS also takes positions on pre-K through 12th grade education and higher education policy and tracks state legislation affecting certification policy.
NBPTS’s membership in ALEC’s Education Task Force is documented in task force agendas and materials obtained by Common Cause and publicly released last week.
The Education Task Force is currently co-chaired by Connections Academy, a for-profit education company owned by Pearson (a British-based company that publishes Prentice Hall and Addison-Wesley textbooks as well as the Financial Times and Penguin Group imprints), that contracts with charter schools, school districts, or governmental entities to provide “online” lessons to students.
New members of ALEC’s Education Task Force as of the upcoming Spring Task Force meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina this month are the James Madison Institute (JMI) of Florida and the Pioneer Institute of Massachusetts, both members of the Koch-funded State Policy Network of right wing state think tanks. JMI has partnered with the Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), another ALEC member whose chairman is former Florida Governor Jeb Bush. In 2008, FEE and JMI co-hosted a “national summit on education reform” in Florida focused on increased testing, school privatization, and charter schools.
For more information on ALEC’s education task force, its corporate members, and its long term support for school privatization, see CMD’s previous reporting here.
Corporations that have publicly cut ties to ALEC in recent weeks include Kaplan Higher Education, Procter & Gamble, YUM! Brands, Blue Cross Blue Shield, American Traffic Solutions, Reed Elsevier, Arizona Public Service, Mars, Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Intuit, Kraft Foods, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola. 29 legislators have also publicly cut ties with ALEC in recent weeks.
CMD, Color of Change, Common Cause and others are now asking Amazon, State Farm, AT&T, and Johnson & Johnson to cut ties with ALEC.
This article was originally published by the Center for Media and Democracy at PRWatch.org. CMD also released theALECexposed.org project in 2011, exposing the “model” legislation created behind closed doors by corporations working with state legislators in the American Legislative Exchange Council. This project has received the Sidney Award and the Izzy Award.
Rebekah Wilce has a degree in writing from the University of Arizona. She is the lead writer for CMD’s Food Rights Network, with expertise in food and agriculture issues.
3 Comments
“NBPTS’s membership in ALEC’s Education Task Force is documented in task force agendas and materials obtained by Common Cause and publicly released last week.”
Isn’t it curious that so many of these organizations and corporations only recuse themselves from an ALEC task force once their participation becomes public?
How noble and forthright of them. Kudos to all those turning the klieg lights on the shabby denizens of the Koch underground.
How a “Legislative Exchange Council” has a say in teacher standards escapes me.
It does seem that if you turn the lights on, rats and roaches run for cover.
And when you raid the whorehouse, lots of “respectable” people run out the back door.
This is good news, but hardly surprising since ALEC has targeted the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards for replacement by one of its own corporate-backed entities. The general impression among progressives is that ALEC and its backers are interested in driving down teacher benefits, pensions etc simply in order to create nice for-profit charters for their backers. But it’s worth considering that a deeper and even more insidious aspect of the ALEC agenda is to create a more compliant teacher work force that will better assist in the pacification of each new generation.
All the blather about “standards” and “accountability” manifests itself on the kid level as simply all multiple choice all the time. The all important standardized tests are always multiple choice and the prep for such tests consists of model tests,. i.e. multiple choice practice tests. And what classroom instruction occurs consists of going over questions on such model tests. Hence, every day becomes a multiple choice day.
And the dirty little secret of all this multiple choice is that it teaches kids a very simple lesson, no matter what the subject: Those in authority have all the answers – and your job is only to figure out what they want you to say. And there are essay and oral answer grading programs on the horizon that will serve the same function, i.e. teaching the young that authority has all the answers, punishments and rewards.
If you have the stamina to sort through the ALEC Exposed website (alecexposed.org) created by the Center for Media and Democracy you will find endless ALEC-designed “educational reform” model bills and significantly one is designed to downgrade teacher certification requirements. (This fits in well with a spate of recent articles attacking the admittedly poor quality education programs in many universities) The goal is, I think, not so much to get cheaper teachers but to get teachers who will simply hand out and collect test and test prep materials that will then be fed into automated grading systems made by Scantron, Inc. and other ALEC backers. Not only would highly educated teachers want more money – they also might make problems by questioning the kind of mindless “teaching” designed to even further dumb down the populace. ALEC and its backers want teachers who will function much the same as McDonald employees, purveying a readymade product.
You may well question why ALEC and its backers need an even more dumbed down populace, since this is the same American electorate who can be convinced of almost anything, even the need to send its sons and daughters off to wars generation after generation. Well, the wealthy and powerful never think they have enough control over the working class, any more than they ever think they have enough money.
LINK to ALEC model bill designed to lower teacher certification standards: