Connecting the dots -- ALEC and Milton Friedman provide missing link to Reaganite school reform in 1983

D R A F T

Surprise! Surprise! ALEC and the Koch brothers have been heavily involved in it since 1983. Remember Milton Friedman? Him, too.

Cashing in on Kids: 172 ALEC Education Bills Push Privatization in 2015 - See more at: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/03/13054/cashing-kids-172-alec-education-bills-2015#sthash.pZHGFCqD.dpuf http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/03/13054/cashing-kids-172-alec-education-bills-2015 http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/03/13054/cashing-kids-172-alec-education-bills-2015

Submitted by Brendan Fischer on March 8, 2016 - 8:57am

- See more at: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/03/13054/cashing-kids-172-alec-education-bills-2015#sthash.pZHGFCqD.dpuf

Until recently, ALEC boasted on the "history" section of its website that it first started promoting "such 'radical' ideas as a [educational] voucher system" in 1983, taking up ideas first articulated decades earlier by ALEC ally, Milton Friedman, who was an economist with the University of Chicago.

Although ALEC and other school privatizers today frame "vouchers"—taxpayer-funded tuition for private, and often religious, schools—in terms of "opportunity" for low-income students and giving parents the "choice" to send their children to public or private schools, the group was less judicious in its earlier years.

The commentary to ALEC's original 1984 voucher bill states that its purpose is "to introduce normal market forces" into education, and to "dismantle the control and power of" teachers' unions by directing money from public institutions to private ones that were less likely to be unionized.

Friedman was more explicit when addressing ALEC's 2006 meeting. He explained that vouchers are really a step towards "abolishing the public school system."

"How do we get from where we are to where we want to be?" Friedman asked the ALEC crowd.

"Of course, the ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it. Then parents would have enough money to pay for private schools, but you're not gonna do that."

Instead, Friedman said, the politically feasible way of moving towards an entirely private educational system is through vouchers:

So you have to ask, what are politically feasible ways of solving the problem. The answer, in my opinion, is choice, that you have to change the way government money is directed. Instead of it being used to finance schools and buildings, you should decide how much money you are willing to spend on each child and give that money, provide that money in the form of a voucher to the parents of the children so the parents can choose a school that they regard as best for their child.

Thanks to the work of the Koch-funded ALEC, David Koch's Americans for Prosperity, and the DeVos-funded American Federation for Children, thirteen states and the District of Columbia have adopted a basic voucher scheme.

- See more at: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/03/13054/cashing-kids-172-alec-education-bills-2015#sthash.pZHGFCqD.dpuf