Anderson (2014) Privatazing Schooling and Policy Making PDF

Educational Policy
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Privatizing Schooling and Policy Making: The American Legislative

Exchange Council and New Political and Discursive Strategies of
Education Governance
Gary L. Anderson and Liliana Montoro Donchik
Educational Policy published online 16 May 2014
DOI: 10.1177/0895904814528794
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DOI: 10.1177/0895904814528794
American Legislative epx.sagepub.com
Exchange Council
and New Political and
Discursive Strategies of
Education Governance
Gary L. Anderson1 and Liliana Montoro Donchik1
Abstract
In this article, we examine the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)
as an example of a unique node within larger policy networks composed
of new policy entrepreneurs (e.g., venture philanthropists, think tanks,
private “edubusinesses” and their lobbyists, advocacy organizations, and
social entrepreneurs). These new policy networks, through an array of new
modalities of governance and political and discursive strategies, have come
to exert an impressive level of influence on public policy in the last 30 years
in the United States. We describe and analyze several model education bills
that ALEC has promoted and describe the political and discursive strategies
ALEC employs. We found that these strategies, which are employed by
corporate leaders and largely Republican legislators, are aimed at a strategic
alliance of neoliberal, neoconservative, libertarian, and liberal constituencies
with the goal of privatizing and marketizing public education.
Keywords
policy formation, politics of education, educational reform, governance
1New York University, New York, USA

Corresponding Author:
Gary L. Anderson, New York University, 100 Bleecker St. 12E, New York, NY 10012, USA.
Email: ga34@nyu.edu

2 Educational Policy
In rapid succession, laws were passed in three different states that caused
national protests. In Wisconsin, the new law was aimed at limiting the rights
of public sector unions; In Florida, it was the Stand Your Ground law that
made George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin household names; and in sev-
eral states, Pennsylvania’s being the most comprehensive, voter ID laws were
passed that some claimed were a thinly veiled attempt to take Democratic
voters off the roles. Journalists around the country began connecting the dots
and identified a little known organization, the American Legislative Exchange
Council (ALEC), as a central culprit in all three cases.
What they often did not say was that ALEC did not act alone, but rather
was part of a large and proliferating network of new policy actors who have
over the last four decades worked largely behind the scenes to accrue signifi-
cant policy influence at the state and national levels. Still, the fact that ALEC
was highly influential in setting new policy agendas in multiple states across
policy sectors points to the importance of studying its successful political and
discursive strategies. While not as controversial as other of ALEC’s task
forces, its Education Task Force is quietly sponsoring bills in state legisla-
tures that promote a particular set of education policies informed by a free-
market, libertarian ideology.
New Policy Entrepreneurs and New Policy

Networks
In the new world of educational reform, it has become apparent that the old
interest group politics of the era of the Keynesian Welfare State have shifted
as new policy actors and networks have entered the political arena (Ball,
2008, 2012). In the post–World War II decades until the 1980s, U.S. educa-
tors, represented by their professional associations and unions, had less com-
petition from other policy actors and, therefore a more significant voice in
education policy (DeBray, 2006). These interest groups were also part of a
knowledge regime based on what Harvey (2005) calls “embedded liberal-
ism,” that is, markets, personal freedoms, and individual choices were
embedded in regulatory and social welfare policies aimed—in theory, at
least—at a common good. The schooling of low-income children was viewed
as embedded in out-of-school societal supports.
Today educators are competing with a new neoliberal knowledge regime
promoted by wealthy philanthropists, corporate-funded think tanks, private
“edubusinesses” and their lobbyists, and other policy entrepreneurs (Ball,
2009; Scott, 2009). These relatively recent policy players have formed pow-
erful policy networks aimed at disembedding markets and individuals from
regulatory policies and social welfare protections. Schooling is viewed as

Anderson and Donchik 3
disembedded from out-of-school factors that impact children (Berliner,

2009). This process of disembedding requires new policies and new ways of
thinking about the individual and society. While we will refer to these net-
works as neoliberal, they are actually a strategic alliance that draws from
proponents of neoclassical economics, social conservatives, libertarians, and
liberals.
New neoliberal policy networks have three interconnected goals: (1) a
critique of and attempt to change public perception of current policies and the
creation of a new “common sense” (Gramsci, 1971; Lakoff, 2004); (2) the
creation of new policies that dismantle the current infrastructure of embed-
ded liberalism and its replacement by libertarian, free market-friendly poli-
cies (Friedman, 1962; Hill, 2010); and (3) the privatization of the policy
process itself (Ball, 2012; Brenner & Theodore, 2002). These three goals
form the basic conceptual framework for our analysis of ALEC.
There is some research that identifies these networked policy actors and
some of the new forms of networked governance they are employing to gain
influence (Anderson, 2009; Ball, 2008, 2009; Henry, 2011; Miskel & Song,
2004; Saltman, 2010; Scott, 2009; Scott & DiMartino, 2009: Williamson,
2012). Some education policy scholars are also beginning to produce critical
scholarship on specific policy entrepreneurs and nodes of new policy net-
works (see Saltman, 2009, on Eli Broad; Kovaks & Christie, 2009, on the
Gates Foundation; Coffield, 2012, on McKinsey and Company; Heilig & Jez,
2010, on Teach for America; and Miron, Urschel, Yat Aguilar, & Dailey,
2011, on the Education Management Organizations [EMO]). While their suc-
cess at privatizing significant portions of public education is well docu-
mented, less is known about how and to what extent they have privatized the
policy process itself. This privatization of public policy goes beyond private
citizens using their considerable wealth to influence policy, and even beyond
the usual corporate lobbying. In the case of ALEC, legislators and corporate
leaders sit down together to write public policy, making ALEC an important
and unique node of this broader neoliberal policy network.
We have chosen to study ALEC and its role in privatizing public education
and the policy process for several reasons. First, it is a powerful policy advo-
cacy organization that has flown under the radar for decades, and, other than
journalistic accounts, has not been closely studied. Second, a cache of 800
model or template bills produced by ALEC were recently made available by
the Center for Media and Democracy, presenting a unique opportunity to
study trends across bills. Third, it is a unique policy organization that com-
bines several older modalities of governance (special interest lobbying and
advocacy) while it also exemplifies many of the newer modalities of gover-
nance, such as its use of internal “partnerships,” its location as a node within

larger policy networks, its “think tank” status, its complex or creative politi-
cal and discursive strategies, and its largely successful attempt to privatize
the policy process.
The central questions that guided the study were the following: Which
issues has ALEC focused on in education over the last 20 years? What are the
themes that tie ALEC’s model bills together and what is the nature of the
knowledge regime ALEC is promoting? What political and discursive strate-
gies does ALEC deploy to effectively promote its neoliberal ideological
agenda? Through content and discourse analysis, we will analyze ALEC’s
model bills and political and discursive strategies, and its importance as both
a networked policy entrepreneur and new modality of governance in educa-
tion that has made important inroads into discrediting embedded liberalism
and promoting a free-market, neoliberal knowledge regime (Aasen, Proitz, &
Sandberg, 2013).
New Modalities and Strategies of Governance

Most Americans are familiar with the influence of powerful lobbyists on
Capital Hill and the revolving door of politicians and private sector CEOs.
Most are aware, particularly in the wake of the Citizens United Supreme
Court decision that gave corporations the rights of individuals and declared
money a form of free speech, that our elections and government are flooded
with mass amounts of cash and influence peddling. However, this growing
privatization of the policy process also takes place through corporate-funded
new policy networks aimed at influencing policy discourses as well as the
bills that are introduced into the state legislatures. This process of influence
is accomplished not only through bringing together powerful public and pri-
vate sector actors but also through new modalities of governance and effec-
tive political and discursive strategies.
While modalities and strategies sometimes overlap, modalities tend to be
more structural and long term than strategies. For instance, a modality of new
governance might be think tanks, public–private partnerships, network gov-
ernance through interlocking boards, aggressive forms of philanthropy, or
social entrepreneurialism. Strategies can be political or discursive. An exam-
ple of a political strategy would be the Race to the Top’s strategy of leverag-
ing policy changes in multiple states through the use of competition for the
4.35 billion dollars set aside from the American Recovery and Investment
Act of 2009. Borrowing a page from the World Bank’s playbook, the federal
government used a relatively small economic incentive to leverage signifi-
cant policy change in a majority of states, including lifting caps on charter
schools and implementing new teacher evaluation models based on student
test scores.

An example of a discursive strategy was the replacement of the term equal

educational opportunity with the achievement gap under the administration
of George W. Bush (Crawford, 2007). While both terms reflect an equity
focus, this discursive strategy redirected funding and educational research
from those out-of-school factors and their impact on student achievement and
social inequality to within-school factors, focusing on outcomes, usually
defined quantitatively, and often limited to test scores.
Discursive strategies are not new. Orwellian language has long been used
to promote policies. However, in an age of political operatives like Karl
Rove, it has increasingly become akin to a science, and has been employed
more systematically than ever before, particularly at the problem-framing
stage (Lakoff, 2008). There seems to be general agreement, for instance, that
the A Nation at Risk report represented a general reframing of school reform
by positioning public schools as in crisis (Mehta, 2013). This article seeks to
provide a window into just one of the many corporate-funded advocacy orga-
nizations that are continuing to effectively frame education “problems” and
push through legislation that may have little actual public support.
A Brief Overview of ALEC

ALEC is composed of state legislators and corporate leaders who collaborate
to produce model or template bills that are introduced or promoted by ALEC
members within state legislatures. On its website, ALEC states that its mission
is “to advance the Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government,
federalism, and individual liberty, through a nonpartisan public-private part-
nership of America’s state legislators, members of the private sector, the fed-
eral government, and general public” (ALEC, n.d.-b, para. 1).
ALEC has been actively promoting model legislation for nearly 40 years
behind the scenes and largely under the media and research community’s
radar. But in 2011, The Center for Media and Democracy “leaked”1 nearly
800 of its model bills to the public making visible the extent to which it has
been actively promoting policy initiatives in various sectors, including edu-
cation, by writing bills that benefit the ideological and financial interests of
corporations.
The protests and media attention ALEC received primarily as a result of
its role in promoting voter ID laws that disproportionally targeted voters of
color have led 25 corporations, 5 non-profits, and 55 legislators to cancel
their memberships or support of ALEC. The controversy and the withdrawal
of some corporate support led ALEC to close one of its nine task forces—
Public Safety and Elections. However, eight task forces remain that continue
to produce model bills including Education; Civil Justice; Commerce,

Insurance, and Economic Development; Communications and Technology;

Energy, Environment, and Agriculture; Health and Human Services;
International Relations; and Tax and Fiscal Policy.
ALEC receives the vast majority of its funding directly from corporations
that pay “membership dues” that are many times the dues paid by legislative
members. Membership for legislative members is a largely symbolic $50 a
year and represents a mere 2% of ALEC’s funding. Corporations can pay up
to $25,000 a year or more in membership dues (Graves, 2011). ALEC also
takes some money from venture philanthropists, most notably, the Koch
brothers, whose father Fred Koch was a founding member of the John Birch
Society. David Koch founded Americans for Prosperity, which along with
the Heartland Institute is part of the inner circle of ALEC’s policy network.
Other right-wing foundations, such as Castle Rock (Peter Coors), John M.
Olin Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and Bradley Foundation are among
ALEC’s funders as well as also part of their ideological network.
Our analysis of ALEC as a powerful member of a new network of policy
entrepreneurs reflects broader global shifts. The global move toward neolib-
eralism not only results in neoclassical economic policies, but these policies
lead to deep cultural (Sennett, 1998) and political (Boggs, 2000) changes.2 In
the political realm, some claim that neoliberalism is leading to a shift from
government to governance, introducing new modalities of governance that
work in tandem with government. These new modalities which are more
characterized by networks or “heterarchies’ than hierarchies include more
sophisticated forms of influencing behavior, steering from a distance, setting
policy agendas, reculturing organizations, introducing new policy entrepre-
neurs, and creating a new common sense (Ball, 2012; Kickert, 1995; Rhodes,
1997).
ALEC presents itself as a “public–private partnership,” since it brings
together private corporations and state legislators from the public sector. But
it is more than a public–private partnership. It is a partnership internally—or
perhaps more correctly, a strategic alliance—and externally a node within a
larger network of think tanks, corporate lobbyists, venture philanthropists,
and advocacy organizations that together form part of this new modality of
governance. Figure 1 provides a visual overview of ALEC and some of its
broader network partners. The Education Task Force is like a mini-ALEC,
embedded in its own special interest network (see Figure 2). We did not do a
formal network analysis of ALEC (e.g., relative strength of network nodes,
interlocking boards, etc.) and so our focus in this article is not on network
governance as a modality of governance. Instead, we were interested in the
political and discursive strategies of governance that ALEC deployed to
exert political and ideological influence. However, while ALEC’s extensive
networks and funders are not foregrounded in our study, they represent a

Figure 1. ALEC’s network

Note. Members and funders listed are selected examples from a much longer list.
ALEC = American Legislative Exchange Council.
material and ideological matrix that in the aggregate provides the synergism
that helps to make the political and discursive strategies we analyze politi-
cally influential.
Methods of Analysis
Our data set is a corpus of texts that includes 54 model bills produced by
ALEC task forces between 1992 and 2013; the ALEC website; the ALEC
agenda, memoranda, and minutes for the 2012 and 2013 Education Task

Figure 2. ALEC Education Task Force members.

Source. Center for Media and Democracy and ALEC website.
Note. Co-chairs: David Casas (R-GA) and Mickey Revenaugh, senior vice president and
founder of Connections Academy. ALEC = American Legislative Exchange Council.
aDenotes these entities are no longer affiliated with ALEC as of 2013.
Force Summits; articles focusing on education in ALEC’s journal Inside

ALEC, including a special Issue on education (Sept./Oct. 2011); a 2005 spe-
cial issue on school choice of another ALEC publication The State Factor:
Jeffersonian Principles in Action; and a sampling of ALEC’s annual
Education Report Card for the States. While our main focus is on the model
bills, the corpus of texts chosen for analysis represent a triangulation of dif-
ferent text genres produced by ALEC.
The model bills are the center of our analysis and represent a specific kind
of legal genre with a particular legalistic style and template. As noted above,
these were part of a corpus of 800 ALEC model bills that The Center for
Media and Democracy leaked to make them available to journalists and
researchers. For this article, we chose to focus only on education bills focus-
ing on K-12 education, although model bills were also released that focus on
higher education.

ALEC obtains tax-exempt status by calling itself an educational organiza-

tion or think tank. While its core activity is the writing and promotion of
model bills, it also produces a series of publications that promote its neolib-
eral and libertarian ideology. Therefore, we also analyzed nine articles on
education published in Inside ALEC and The State Factor that represent a
more narrative style characteristic of advocacy journalism. The ALEC web-
site and Annual Report Card present ALEC’s mission and singles out those
outcomes valued by ALEC. Finally, the memoranda that contain the agendas
for the 2012 annual meetings in Charlotte and Washington, D.C., contain
information about topics and discussions at ALEC’s Education Task Force
meetings. They provide information on model bills that are currently being
proposed and adopted by the Education Task Force.
While these texts will be analyzed using the methods described below,
there are other sources about ALEC that will form part of our analysis. These
are primarily reports and articles written by investigative journalists and
researchers at progressive advocacy organizations, such as Common Cause,
The Center for Media and Democracy, The Nation Institute, People for the
American Way, and Progress Now. While these groups are largely ideologi-
cally critical of ALEC, in the absence of academic scholarship on ALEC,
they represent the only empirical research available.
Methods of text analysis were drawn from qualitative (Saldana, 2009) and
discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1992). While we began with wholistic cod-
ing, given the focus on political and discursive strategies, we ultimately
focused largely on values coding and metaphor analysis (for ALEC’s
espoused values, underlying assumptions, and ideology); narrative analysis
(how texts “attribute cause, blame, and responsibility”; Stone, 1989, p. 282);
longitudinal coding (to establish changes over time); and intertextuality
(what other “texts” were appropriated). We also did in vivo (insider language)
coding and vocabulary and phrase counts (to capture importance and repeti-
tion of themes). All of these different approaches to the texts allowed for tri-
angulation of themes and the discovery of themes that one or another approach
might not have captured.
ALEC and New Governance

As discussed above, new modalities of governing society have emerged in
recent decades (Ball, 2008; Bevir & Rhodes, 2003). This shift has been from
classical notions of government within nation-states to the emergence of
global, national, and local policy network governance. ALEC is in some
ways a prototypical organization that represents many aspects of new net-
work governance, and its formation parallels the historical period in which
new modalities of governance were emerging.

ALEC was founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage

Foundation, and in 1981, shortly after his election, President Reagan formed
the national Task Force on Federalism and incorporated input from ALEC
members. ALEC members became increasingly influential on the policies
enacted during the Reagan administration and created internal task forces “to
develop policy covering virtually every responsibility of state government”
(ALEC, n.d.-a, para. 4). These task forces are active today in shaping state-
level policy in many arenas.
Heclo, as early as 1978, identified what he called “issue networks,” draw-
ing attention to what was then viewed as a new phenomenon. Eventually this
has led to the finding, supported by the Advocacy Coalition Framework
(Sabatier & Weible, 2007), that shared ideologies have a positive effect on
collaborative ties within networks and that actors form networks to translate
shared beliefs into policy (Henry, 2011). In this sense, ALEC is a classic
“issue network,” that has grown into a multi-issue, cross-sector network that
incorporates a wide array of ideologically compatible nodes. In the last four
decades, this dense and well-funded issue network has been instrumental in
promoting a rightward shift in U.S. policy.
The notion that a global and national rightward ideological shift has
occurred over the last four decades is widely accepted and empirically evi-
dent, but how the shift from Keynesianism to neoclassical economic models
has occurred is still being documented by historians and political scientists
(Harvey, 2005; Prasad, 2006). With particular relevance to this study in the
U.S. context, Burris (2008) has provided a network analysis of shifting power
relations in the United States during this period. Building on a body of
research in business schools on interlocking corporate boards, he has extended
this research to interlocking boards of what he calls policy-planning organi-
zations, which include think tanks and advocacy organizations. He found that
moderate conservative big-business associations like the Business Council
and the Business Roundtable have consistently remained central nodes of this
policy-planning network. However, in the 1970s, they were linked with the
corporate liberals (e.g., Brookings Institution, Council on Foreign Relations,
etc.), whereas by the 1990s they became more closely linked to ultra conser-
vatives (e.g., American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Hoover
Institute, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, etc.). Based on these findings, he
argues that changes in the structure of these policy networks over time helps
account for the rightward shift in U.S. policy during the 1970s, 1980s, and
1990s.
More specific to education, this resurgence of neoclassical economics has
been accompanied by a rapid growth of participation by the corporate and
business community in education policy and reform. The previous incursion

of business into education during the early 20th century helped create an
allegedly efficient “factory” model of schooling that business claims to
oppose today (Callahan, 1962).3 This more recent cycle of business involve-
ment has retained the focus on managerial efficiency and measurement, but
is more multifaceted, market-based, and pervasive than that of the early 20th
century. By the 1980s, efficiency-oriented “new managerialism” or “new
public management” promoted by business groups was being introduced into
education in the United States largely through extensive workshops on Total
Quality Management (Saltman, 2009), Baldridge approaches to instruction
(Davies, 2010), and a managerialist shift from a concern with inputs into the
system to an emphasis on measurable and high-stakes outcomes (Fusarelli &
Johnson, 2004; Ward, 2011). The basic premise of new managerialism4 is that
public bureaucracies should be organized more closely around principals of
private sector businesses with entrepreneurial and efficiency-minded CEOs
at their helm.
By the 1990s, new issue networks had successfully introduced a market
logic into education (and all sectors of society) through choice policies, char-
ter schools, contracting to the private sector, public–private partnerships, and
restricted voucher systems (Friedman, 1962). This mix of New Public
Management and the creation of quasi-markets resulted in what O’Reilly and
Reed (2010) refer to as the dominance in the public sector of markets, met-
rics, and managers.
While ALEC is only one of many nodes within the new policy networks
that helped create the new political narrative that supports these changes, its
existence parallels the time period of the emergence and development of
these networks. But, as powerful as ALEC’s internal and external network
has become, it is also important to remember that it is not uncontested. While
weakened, traditional interest groups, such as teachers unions and some pro-
fessional associations and academic researchers, are contesting their neolib-
eral agenda.
Furthermore, new network modalities of governance are not limited to the
political right. New neoliberal policy networks have spawned a series of pro-
gressive counter-networks, often, themselves, supported by philanthropy. In
Figure 3, we have documented the emergence of an ALEC counter-network
consisting of progressive politicians, think tanks, and advocacy organiza-
tions. Whether these counter-networks represent a sustainable countervailing
force or whether they are merely an ad hoc reaction to ALEC will depend on
how effectively they can manage these new modalities of network gover-
nance (including funding), and the political and discursive strategies that
conservative and neoliberal advocacy organizations have so successfully
deployed.

Figure 3. Network of organizations that oppose ALEC.

Note. ALEC = American Legislative Exchange Council.
Data Analysis: ALEC’s Political Goals

While an analysis of ALEC’s political and discursive strategies is central to
our study, we also analyzed the content of the model bills to identify which
issues ALEC’s Education Task Force was taking up and ALEC’s overall
political goals within the education sector. ALEC’s espoused political goals
are clearly expressed on their website and throughout their publications, but
an analysis of the model bills reveals how these espoused ideals are expressed
through the actions of corporate leaders and legislators as they produce the
model bills. While ALEC’s espoused mission statement is clear about its
grounding in free markets, limited government, federalism, and individual
liberty, a wholistic coding of the model bills of the Education Task Force
found that bills tended to cluster around three main themes: (a) the privatiza-
tion of public assets, or, in other words, the transfer of state taxpayer dollars
from public schools to private non-profit or for-profit education corporations;
(b) opposition to teachers unions, tenure, and certification; and (c) the trans-
fer of new managerialist principles to the public sector. These themes

represented over 90% of ALEC’s model education bills. There was one other
smaller cluster: (d) the promotion of conservative and moral social values.
The last, while present, is notable for the small number of bills that focus
directly on moral or religious issues. This is not surprising if one considers
that ALEC primarily promotes corporate interests, which tend more toward
free-market, neoclassical economic issues. While we will discuss some of the
model bills in this section, Appendix A contains a more complete table of
model bills organized by themes.
There is an important convergence of interests in ALEC between the neo-
liberal and libertarian principals of its founders and the economic self-inter-
est of the dues paying corporate CEOs. The central theme of the majority of
model bills is the transference of funding and control from the public to the
private sector, or the privatization of public assets. Discursively, this is for
ideological reasons (e.g., shrink government, individual freedom), but most
corporations that are members of ALEC are involved for more than ideologi-
cal reasons that are seldom mentioned in ALEC documents. They see these
model bills as creating new markets to exploit within the public education
sector, 2009).
A second and somewhat smaller set of bills focus on the teaching profes-
sion, especially unions, tenure, and alternative certification. Unions are an
ideological target of ALEC, but also represent an obstacle to profit making in
a highly labor-intensive field like education. Here again, we see an interest
convergence between ALEC’s ideological agenda and corporate profits. The
remaining bills promote new managerialist, business models or conservative
moral issues. In the following sections (and in Appendix A), we have orga-
nized the bills into these four analytic themes.
Model Bills Focusing on the Privatization of Public Assets

ALEC’s model bills promoting privatization are not only aimed at public
education. There are many bills that promote the privatization of prisons, the
military, those aspects of health care that are still public, social security and
public pensions. As a practical matter, as state budgets shrink, states are sav-
ing money by contracting to private sector companies with lower salaries and
fewer benefits, as well as shifting public responsibilities onto unpaid labor in
the informal sector (the local community, families, and individuals) (Apple,
2001). While the privatization of public assets and the profits to be made are
central objectives of ALEC’s privatization bills, another objective is to mar-
ketize the public sector so that it behaves internally more like a market than a
political democracy (Chubb & Moe, 1990; Plank & Boyd, 1994).
While most of ALEC’s members are policy entrepreneurs, selling a par-
ticular policy frame or ideology, it is often difficult to discern where policy

entrepreneurship ends and profit seeking, which sees public education (and
the public sector generally) as an untapped economic opportunity, begins.
This is where ALEC’s connections to broader policy networks is instructive.
For example, many of ALEC’s members are also members of the Education
Industry Association, a lobby organization that promotes the interests of edu-
cation vendors. Its website notes,
The education industry is poised for explosive growth in all of its segments
from pre K-12 through post-secondary education. In fact, education is rapidly
becoming a $1 trillion industry, second in size only to the health care industry,
and represents 10 percent of America’s GNP. Federal, state and local
expenditures on education exceed $750 billion. (Education Industry Association
website)
Bills promoting either the privatization of public assets or the creation of

quasi-markets represented the vast majority of model bills. Many of the cor-
porations that join ALEC have specific financial interests to promote through
model bills. So while some model bills are promoted for what ALEC refers to
as Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism,
and individual liberty, they also serve to lay the groundwork for certain edu-
cation industries to prosper. For instance, EMO franchises and tutoring com-
panies like Sylvan and Kaplan or corporations like Pearson are the most
obvious beneficiaries (Koyama, 2011). But as Altwerger and Strauss (2002)
and Burch (2009) have documented, many other industries have created
niche markets in education. An ALEC model bill titled the School Board
Freedom to Contract Act directly encourages private sector outsourcing, par-
ticularly technology, maintenance, food services, and transportation.
Technology is the fastest growing market in the education industry. The
data management industry that provides testing and data warehousing and
management services to school districts is promoted in model bills that focus
on accountability and testing. As we will take up in more detail below, these
accountability-oriented bills not only serve the interests of a growing data
industry but also appeal to a managerial professional class that is less inter-
ested in profit seeking.
A model bill called the Virtual Public Schools Act promotes online schools
that receive the state per pupil allocation for each student in spite of the fact
that they do not have to provide brick and mortar services such as gyms,
chemistry labs, libraries, transportation, and so on. The bill allows for subsi-
dizing internet access, which could make such schools more attractive for
low-income families, but also would increase the market for the online and
virtual schools industry.

A one-to-one systematic link from model bills to the financial interests of

corporate members of ALEC is not always easy to establish. However, the
corporate co-chair of ALEC’s Education Task Force, Mickey Revenaugh,
was the executive vice president of Connections Academy, a for-profit virtual
school company that promoted the Virtual Public Schools Act. Connections
Academy was started in 2001 by Sylvan Ventures. Its parent company
Connections Education was recently purchased by Pearson. In addition, there
is a digital learning sub-committee within the Education Task Force currently
discussing a model bill titled Online Course Choice for Students (ALEC
Memorandum to Education Task Force members, April 6, 2012).
Model Bills Focusing on Teachers Unions, Tenure, and

Certification
Using a discourse of teacher quality, 9 of the 54 model education bills were
anti-union, anti-tenure, or promoted alternative certification over university-
based teacher education. Bills contained language such as “certification fair-
ness” (to elevate the status of the conservative National Council on Teacher
Quality), “teacher choice compensation,” and “great teachers and leaders
act.” This last one is a 2010 model bill that promotes teacher evaluations
based on student achievement, allowing tenure to be revoked after 2 consecu-
tive years of insufficient academic growth. The Teacher Choice Compensation
Act creates a program where teachers may be eligible for performance based
salary increases if they opt out of their permanent contract and meet student
performance goals. This draws on an older, more mainstream discourse of
career ladders for teachers, but now to “choose” it, teachers must opt into
year-to-year contracts.
While teacher-focused bills are not discursively concerned with privatiza-
tion, the elimination of public sector unions and teacher tenure and a reduc-
tion in certification requirements, all have important implications for making
a profit from education. This is because, unlike some other “industries,” edu-
cation is highly labor intensive, making it hard to make a profit without
reducing labor costs. ALEC publications however do not present this argu-
ment, because given its corporate partners, it might appear self-serving.
Instead, throughout ALEC publications, teachers unions are subsumed under
“establishment organizations” that oppose vouchers, or are described as
inherently inefficient, protect bad teachers, and place the interests of adults
over those of children. A critique of teachers unions is also often implicit in
ALEC arguments that voucher programs save districts money by having par-
ents opt for private schools, which are typically non-union (Enlow & Ladner,
2005).

Model Bills Appealing to a New Managerialist, Professional

Middle Class
ALEC is an overwhelmingly Republican organization and is ideologically to
the political right of even moderate republicans and neoliberal “New
Democrats.” However, it ultimately needs some moderates to support its
policies within state legislatures. For this reason, bills are often promoted
with a discourse that appeals to what Apple (2001) describes as new middle
class professionals who embrace new managerialist approaches to public sec-
tor organizations. The notion that schools (public sector) should be run like
businesses (private sector), while lacking any evidentiary warrant, has
become a new “common sense” among a wide swath of the American public
(Cuban, 2004; Goodsell, 2004; Mautner, 2010).
In fact, one of ALEC’s model bills supports No Child Left Behind (NCLB),
a bipartisan law that contains some pro-market aspects and employs the lan-
guage of new managerialism that appealed to new democrats, while its equity
provisions and promise of increased federal funding attracted some old dem-
ocrats, like Ted Kennedy. It is for this reason that much of the language of the
model bills presents a kind of Trojan Horse strategy in which conservative
bills are often couched in language congruent with new managerialism.
Model Bills like the Public School Financial Transparency Act and
Educational Enterprise Zone Act contain managerialist language like “finan-
cial transparency” and “enterprise zone” that appeals to the deep frames of
business-oriented new democrats. But in reality, the Educational Enterprise
Zone Act is really a voucher bill and the Public School Financial Transparency
Act, while promoting greater public sector transparency, ignores the fact that
school revenues and expenditures are already public documents, which is not
the case with private schools.
While new managerialism supports more and narrower accountability for
outcomes, it also supports de-regulation of many district and state department
regulations to make organizations more entrepreneurial. Traditionally, char-
ter schools were viewed as a route to de-regulation, but the most recent ALEC
model bill suggests that it now wants to charterize all public school districts.
In 2012, at the Charlotte Spring Task Force Summit (ALEC Memorandum to
Education Task Force Members, April 6, 2012), a District and School
Freedom Act, presented by Jonathan Butcher of Goldwater Institute and
adopted by the task force,
creates a mechanism for public school districts and schools to request exemption
from state education standards and regulations. Under this act, any district or
school can create a list of state regulations or standards that, if exempted from,

the district or school could operate more efficiently and better serve students.
(p. 2)
This model bill, using the discourse of freedom, autonomy, and de-regula-
tion, is designed to be attractive to both libertarians and new managerialists.
Bills Promoting Conservative Social and Moral Values

Some commentators distinguish between ALEC’s economic and social agen-
das. ALEC was forced onto the national stage not because of its far more
numerous bills promoting neoclassical economic policies, but rather because
of two of its bills promoting conservative social values: the voter ID bills and
the Stand Your Ground bills, both coming out of the Public Safety and
Elections Task Force that was co-chaired by the National Rifle Association
and later disbanded in the face of political pressure. In response to voter ID
laws that have been passed in nearly half of the states, a coalition of groups
(see Figure 3) including an ad hoc group, Color of Change, was able to get 25
of ALEC’s corporate supporters to withdraw support, although another node
in ALEC’s policy network, the conservative National Center for Public
Policy, has since formed a voter identification task force to take over ALEC’s
role.
The number of K-12 education bills focusing on conservative social and
moral values was small, limited to four bills focusing on drug use, medicating
students, and the teaching of values clarification or political action skills.
These last two issues are the focus of a 2001 model bill, Resolution on Non-
Verified Science Curriculum Funding. This model resolution requires a peri-
odic review “to comprehensively examine all educational programs and
activities conducted by schools, universities and agencies . . . ” apparently to
eliminate any programs that teach values or political action activities.
ALEC’s network includes an inner circle of those who are members, chair
task forces, contribute money, or have interlocking boards. In general, orga-
nizations promoting social and moral issues are not as prominent within this
inner network. However, an outer circle of the ideological network does
include organizations that have reciprocal citations with ALEC publications
or are exhibitors at their annual conferences and other events. According to
SourceWatch.org, exhibitors include pro-life groups like National Right to
Life Committee and Americans United for Life and other groups, such as the
U.S. English Foundation, National Organization for Marriage, ProFamily
Legislative Network, WallBuilders, and Stop Child Predators. While these
groups seem to have minimal influence on task forces, the National Rifle
Association, as noted above, was the former co-chair of ALEC’s now defunct
Public Safety and Elections Task Force and a significant funder of ALEC.

ALEC’s Political Strategies

In this section, we will discuss some of the political strategies ALEC employs
to promote its mission. There is often overlap between modalities and strate-
gies. For instance, ALEC’s use of policy networks is both a new modality of
governance and a political strategy. While we will not engage in a formal
network analysis, one cannot appreciate ALEC’s success without some refer-
ence to its central strategy of bringing together a “partnership” between cor-
porations and legislators, as this is the core strategy of ALEC’s work and the
thing that sets it apart from lobbyists and think tanks.
Another central political strategy is ALEC’s almost exclusive focus on
promoting state-level legislation as opposed to legislation at the federal level.
Other strategies we will discuss in this section include, ALEC’s ability to,
until recently, not call attention to its work by flying under the media radar,
its attempt to appeal to multiple constituencies, its shotgun approach to send-
ing bills though legislatures, its use of decoy model bills, its state report
cards, and its funding strategies. The appearance of counter-networks and
their success in pressuring ALEC to disband one of its task forces suggests
that while it may appear that these modalities and strategies have favored
conservatives, progressive political groups are beginning to engage in them
as well.
State-Level Focus
ALEC has strategically chosen to work at the state level, working closely
with the State Policy Network (SPN), which “is made up of free market think
tanks—at least one in every state—fighting to limit government and advance
market-friendly public policy at the state and local levels” (State Policy
Network, 2012, p. 1). SPN, today heavily funded by the Koch brothers and
other venture philanthropists, was set up during the Reagan administration to
create smaller versions of the Heritage Foundation in each of the states
(Center for Media & Democracy, 2013). These state-level think tanks publish
reports, actively place op ed pieces in local newspapers, and help coordinate
the promotion of neoliberal and neoconservative bills in state legislatures.
The current co-chair of the Education Task Force is Jonathan Butcher of the
Goldwater Institute, an Arizona member of the State Policy Network. The
two most popular ALEC task forces for SPN are Education and Tax and
Fiscal Policy. SPN itself sits on ALEC’s Education Task Force.
Suspicious of the federal government, ALEC has published a Handbook
for State Lawmakers (Natelson, 2011), which promotes a convention of the
states which under Article V of the Constitution can propose amendments to

the Constitution. While focusing on the state-level ALEC is helping to form

a policy stream (Kingdon, 1995) that, as we will see below, also impacts the
federal level as it promotes a new common sense about the role of markets
and the private sector in American society.
The state-level strategy has worked well in the education sector as there
has been a relative lack of scrutiny to state-level education policy making in
part because the focus in recent years of policy advocacy and analysis in
education has shifted to the federal level. In education, state-level policy
received increased attention in the 1980s during what Mazzoni (1994) called
an “eruption” of policy activism at the state level as states mandated “excel-
lence” through standards. States were also a focus of reform in the 1990s as
state charter school laws emerged (Mazzoni, 1991) and different state-level
accountability systems were created (Anderson, 2001). However, as these
state-level accountability systems became federal law through the passage of
NCLB and the subsequent focus on Race to the Top and Common Core stan-
dards, more research and media attention in education has shifted to the fed-
eral level (DeBray, 2006; Kaestle & Lodewick, 2007).
Moreover, as news organizations have had to reduce budgets, they are less
likely to assign reporters to state houses, leaving lawmakers at the state level
with less journalistic scrutiny, and focusing more attention on the contentious
issues surrounding NCLB, Race to the Top, and the Common Core Standards.
These developments may have contributed until recently to ALEC receiving
little attention from any quarter in spite of the important role it has played at
the state policy level.
Although ALEC’s focus is on state-level policies, our longitudinal analy-
sis of bills demonstrates that ALEC was promoting locally many policies that
later became part of NCLB legislation. This is, in part, because state- and
federal-level advocacy organizations communicate with each and often have
interlocking memberships and boards. Charter school legislation, for instance,
started at the state level—in Minnesota—not at the federal level, and contin-
ues to be a state-level concern. Through coordination among network mem-
bers, the state and federal levels are in constant communication.
Flying Under the Radar

A long-standing strategy of ALEC has been to operate largely under the radar
of media and research scrutiny. Since it has come under greater scrutiny,
ALEC is operating with even more secrecy, making it harder to monitor its
behavior. During the recent controversy, ALEC scrubbed its website of model
laws and names of member legislators, and as a private 501(c)(3), non-profit
“charity,” it does not fall under the freedom of information act.5 While state

legislatures are public organizations, many have enacted exemptions to pub-

lic records law for legislative drafting offices. This makes a systematic analy-
sis of ALEC’s direct influence on state laws more difficult though not
impossible. People for the American Way, Common Cause, The Center for
Media and Democracy, and Progress Now have all provided considerable
analysis, though comprehensive state-by-state analysis is still elusive. While
investigative journalists are actively researching ALEC, an exhaustive search
of academic databases netted virtually no peer-reviewed academic articles on
ALEC.
Shotgun Approach to Model Bills

Another of ALEC’s political strategies is to push multiple bills through at
once to overwhelm lawmakers. This involves at times pushing through bills
they don’t expect to pass as decoys to distract attention so other bills can fly
under the radar (Underwood, 2011; Underwood & Mead, 2012). For instance,
several model bills are variations on a bill called The Parental Choice,
Scholarship, Accountability Act. These bills, couched in the language of
choice and accountability, essentially promote vouchers, but add some miti-
gating element, such as some level of accountability for private schools or
means testing for receiving a voucher. Pushing through lots of voucher bills
with different language or mitigating elements represents a kind of shotgun
approach at getting some kind of voucher bill through that can be expanded
on later. While the concrete goal of vouchers is the privatization of public
assets, the ideological goal is to achieve a shift from the democratic notion of
universal citizenship rights/identities to a system of individual consumer
rights/identities.
Ongoing Networking and Advisement

Not only does ALEC hold an annual gathering that brings together legislators
and corporate CEOs to write model laws, they have a staff of 30 that main-
tains year round contact with members. While investigating the influence of
ALEC in New Jersey, Rizzo (2012) obtained emails and other records that
established a continuous flow of contacts among New Jersey legislators, leg-
islative liaison’s inside Governor Chris Christie’s office, and ALEC’s
30-member staff that advises state legislators. This ongoing communication
culminated with an ALEC policy seminar that was held in Trenton, New
Jersey, in December, 2011. Moreover, Christie’s former chief of staff, Richard
Bagger, was a member of ALEC’s board of directors in 2002 and 2004, rep-
resenting Pfizer. Several other legislators were promoting ALEC bills. For

instance, Sen. Joseph Kyrillos (R-Monmouth) was promoting the Parent

Trigger Act, but he and other legislators claim ALEC is only one of many
sources they use to draft these bills, including other advocacy and lobbying
organizations and legislators in other states. In denying ALEC’s all-encom-
passing influence on state legislators, these politicians are pointing to a
source of the power of network governance—its ability to disseminate its
influence through diffuse and dense networks made up of individual policy
entrepreneurs and large and small organizations with a common ideological
agenda.
Because ALEC (and other network members) have a staff that works with
legislators year around, sometimes bills that states send through their legisla-
tures are more or less aggressive than the bill the ALEC task force has
approved. For instance, in Bill A-980, New Jersey, under Governor Christie,
created a bill that was more aggressive than ALEC’s Next Generation Charter
Schools Act model bill. While the model bill does not mention for-profit char-
ter schools, New Jersey added a provision that allows private for-profit enti-
ties to establish charter schools. The New Jersey bill also “eliminates the
requirement that teachers in charter schools be certified by the state of New
Jersey, eliminates streamlined teacher tenure in charter schools, and allows a
local board of education to convert a public school into a charter school”
(Center for Media and Democracy, 2011).
Annual State Report Cards

For the 18th year, ALEC has published its book-length, state-by-state rank-
ings of state education policies (Ladner & Myslinski, 2013). Publishing state
rankings is a popular political strategy ALEC uses to gain legitimacy as an
educational organization and promote its ideological agenda. Lubienski and
Jameson Brewer (2013), in a review of ALEC’s 2013 report, state that the
report “draws on ratings from market-oriented advocacy groups to grade
states in areas such as support for charter schools, availability of vouchers,
and permissiveness for homeschooling.” They also find that the report does
not appropriately use peer-reviewed literature and its data are either manipu-
lated or wrong. They conclude that the report’s goal seems to be to shift
control of schooling from the public to the private sector rather than improve
schooling.
Member Dues Resource Stream

ALEC has a relatively secure member dues–based resource stream provided
almost entirely by corporate dues. Its capacity has grown over time and has

shown it has the power to influence policy on a large scale. More importantly,
in terms of network governance, the larger neoliberal policy network in
which it is embedded has also grown, and has shown itself to be a major
influence on policy at local, state, and national levels. Policy analysts in edu-
cation have identified a “new politics” in the post NCLB era in which ALEC-
like policy networks of both the political left and right are gaining influence
over previous special interests (DeBray-Pelot & McGuinn, 2009).
But how do we know how effective ALEC’s political strategies have been
at getting model bills through state legislatures? ALEC claims its sponsored
bills have been successful 20% of the time, but they provide no evidence for
this claim. Several advocacy organizations and journalists have compared the
language of bills that were passed in state legislatures with that of ALEC
model bills, and found convincing evidence of ALEC’s footprint. They must
use this indirect research method because ALEC is legally not a lobby orga-
nization, and therefore not governed by the same laws that require the disclo-
sure of lobbyists’ input into bills. In New Jersey, when Rizzo (2012) compared
New Jersey’s School Children First Act with ALEC’s model bill titled Great
Teachers and Leaders Act and found striking similarities, he began to connect
the dots. All of ALEC’s recommended requirements were in the New Jersey
bill: the use of teacher rankings, 50% of the ranking based on student test
scores, formation of a Council for Teacher Effectiveness, tenure after 3 years
of positive evaluations, and so on, and the specific language was eerily simi-
lar to ALEC’s and to the Race to the Top requirements.6 For examples of
comparisons of the language and content of ALEC model bills and bills that
passed state legislatures, see Center for Media and Democracy (2011).
One political strategy that is also a discursive one is ALEC’s attempt to
appeal to a broad ideological alliance that we will describe below. As this
strategy involves the deft use of language and discursive strategies, we will
discuss it in the following section.
ALEC’s Discursive Strategies

Not only have ALEC and other members of these new policy networks
brought new policy actors into the policy arena, they have also created and
validated new policy discourses. ALEC carefully chooses its language in its
publications and in writing model bills to appeal to a bipartisan legislative
audience, reporters, and others who might read them. Those who draft the
model bills understand that strategic use of language can help to create or
reinforce a new common sense as well as make their passage more likely.
Edelman (1978) called this “the linguistic structuring of social problems” (p.
26), recognizing that “how the problem is named involves alternative

scenarios, each with its own facts, value judgments, and emotions” (p. 29).
More recently, Lakoff (2008) has documented the importance of how issues
are framed and how people’s already existing “deep frames” can be accessed
with the right policy language and policy framing. While ALEC alone cannot
achieve this outcome, as part of a networked echo chamber of other similar
think tanks and advocacy organizations adept at accessing the media, it both
benefits from and reinforces this echo chamber of neoliberal and libertarian
discourses.
In reviewing ALEC’s model bills, common tactics such as repetition and
framing were helpful, but it became clear that ALEC was directly or indi-
rectly responding to multiple audiences representing different ideological or
knowledge regimes. Apple (2001) provides a useful overview of what he
calls a “hegemonic alliance of the New Right” including neoliberals, social
conservatives, religious conservatives, and a new professional middle class.7
Apple’s notion of alliances is useful in that even though these groups may
differ in some areas ideologically and politically, they form a sort of informal
coalition pushing for markets, standardization, a reversal of separation of
church and state, and a perpetuation of inequality based on notions of indi-
vidualism and meritocracy. This discursive interplay among these four ideo-
logical regimes can be observed as ALEC attempts to deal with contradictions
among them, while not alienating members of the alliance.8 This alliance was
at least temporarily destabilized with the dissolution of the Safety and
Elections Task Force composed of mostly social and religious
conservatives.
Besides Apple’s (2001) notion of hegemonic alliances, Aasen et al. (2013)
promote the broader notion of knowledge regimes. In the U.S. context, these
knowledge regimes would correspond broadly to the shift from a Keynesian,
Welfare State knowledge regime to a Freidmanian, neoliberal or competition
state knowledge regime. While the macro-level ideological debates between
these knowledge regimes is seldom addressed directly, embedded in ALEC’s
neoliberal discourse is an implied critique and attempt to delegitimize previ-
ous welfare state discourses.
According to discourse analysts, all texts are dialogical, meaning that they
are in dialogue with other texts, whether explicit or implicit. Discourse ana-
lysts refer to this as interdiscursivity or intertextuality (Fairclough, 1992).
This means that implicit in most assertions that ALEC makes is a critique of
another knowledge regime. For instance, the constant evocation in ALEC
documents of “freedom” implies a lack of it under a previous regime in
which, for instance, education was a “public monopoly.” In other words, the
Keynesian, Welfare State, with its unions, public bureaucracies, regulations,
and allegedly dysfunctional school boards, while invisible in the model bills,
is ever present by implication in ALEC’s discourse.

Of course, public education has not yet been completely privatized nor
teachers unions sidelined. Nor has the Welfare State—never very robust in
the United States—been totally dismantled. This is why the language of the
bills and the other documents that ALEC produces are so important. There is
a discursive war going on between two competing knowledge regimes, and
ALEC uses language in their bills and publications to both pass bills and
reinforce a new hegemonic common sense about schooling and society.
Within the New Right alliance, ALEC has to use language in a way that
includes rather than excludes diverse constituencies. As noted in a previous
section, most of the ALEC model bills focused on privatization and diminish-
ing teacher unions and tenure, which mostly appeal to neoliberals. However,
there were also bills that appeal to both social conservatives and the new
professional middle class (many of whom are moderate Republicans and new
democrats) and share a business-like approach that favors markets, account-
ability based on performance measures, and the kinds of standardized tests
that favor the cultural capital of their own children.
For instance, ALEC’s repetition of language, like “freedom,” “family,”
“individual,” and “choice,” are aimed at these deep cultural frames around
individualism that appeal to libertarians and social and religious conserva-
tives. The new managerialist middle class may not be ready to jettison public
schools, but are more likely to respond positively to terms like “accountabil-
ity,” “entrepreneurial,” “scholarship” (but not vouchers), or “quality.” While
some of the less controversial bills use discourses that are fairly straightfor-
ward in terms of the policies they are pursuing (e.g. The Charter School Act),
some are more deceptively strategic. This deception may serve ALEC well as
it attempts to please multiple constituencies and promote their bills without
stirring up the controversy that the voter ID laws provoked.
A central strategy of the model bills we analyzed was that privatizing K-12
public education could be promoted through policies that were not seen as
directly aimed at privatization. In fact, while our vocabulary count of the bills
found that the adjectives “private” and “public” are among the most fre-
quently used words in the bills (only “freedom, ““scholarship,” “parent,”
“tax,” “family,” and “choice” were used more), the more provocative noun
“privatization” is never used. While the term “public” had a high usage count,
it typically appeared incidentally in expressions like “non-public,” public/
private partnerships,” “public funds,” charter schools are “public,” “private
or public.”
Sometimes other terms stand in for privatization. For instance ALEC’s
education accountability act model bill of 1995 appears to be mainly about
holding schools accountable, a policy with growing public appeal at the state
level during that period. However, the centerpiece of the bill is not the

accountability per se, but rather the consequences of not meeting the desig-
nated standards. These consequences are for the school to be declared “edu-
cationally bankrupt”—and to replace the faculty or issue the parents of its
students a voucher to subsidize attendance at a non-public school. This notion
of using high-stakes accountability to close or convert schools is now well
known. But this 1995 model bill foreshadowed the Annual Yearly Progress
(AYP) requirement of NCLB 6 years later, suggesting that ALEC and its
larger policy network had considerable influence on NCLB. While AYP has
essentially been replaced with value added assessment scores, this has not
eliminated privatization as one of the consequences of insufficient improve-
ment in scores. Thus, while policy makers tinker with the technical aspects of
accountability, the push for public school closings, more charter conversions,
and even voucher programs continues.
With the exception of bills that promote charter schools, most of the bills
that promote transferring funds and control to the private sector are couched
in the language of accountability, parent and family rights, or scholarships/
vouchers. The most efficient transfer mechanism is providing vouchers to
parents to use in an open market of public and private schools, a policy first
promoted by Milton Friedman (1962) himself, in Capitalism and Freedom.
But because vouchers have been voted down in several state referenda and
still tend to be controversial, the term “voucher” is rarely used in model bills.
Instead, vouchers are referred to as scholarships, and are often specifically
targeted to sympathetic groups such as military families, foster children, or
autistic and special needs children. Six of the bills focused specifically on
scholarships, and another four promoted tax credits, which means that instead
of receiving a government voucher, a parent can select a non-public school
and receive a tax credit. In both cases, money is transferred from the public
to the private sector. Charter schools also represent a similar transfer when
non-profit or for-profit EMO or a Charter Management Organizations (CMO)
is brought in to manage public schools.
Using the Language of Individual Rights and Choices to Promote

Privatization
A discourse of individual choice is prevalent in ALEC bills, but choice sel-
dom means choosing among public school options. The goal appears to be
the creation of more non-union, private sector choices. This discourse of indi-
vidual choice is often promoted in the language of parent, student, and family
rights. The most recent example is the Parent Trigger Act in which parents
can vote to replace their public schools with a private EMO or CMO. But
according to Lubienski, Scott, Rogers, and Welner (2012), the Parent Trigger

Act is promoted by wealthy funders and “because it outsources school gover-

nance to Educational Management Organizations who have no obligation to
(and often no physical presence in) the community, the parent trigger ulti-
mately thwarts continued, sustained community and parental involvement”
(p. 2).
At the 2012 Winter Task Force Summit in Washington, D.C., Jonathan
Butcher of the Goldwater Institute proposed the School Choice Directory Act
which “requires the state department of education to produce a catalogue of
educational options available in the state….including (as applicable) open
enrollment, charter schools, vouchers, education savings accounts, home-
schooling, and tax credit scholarships” (ALEC Memorandum to Education
Task Force Members, October 25, 2012). This bill seems innocent enough on
the surface, but if one views it in relation to all of the other bills ALEC pro-
motes, it could be viewed as an example of what Plank and Boyd (1994)
called anti-politics or what Boggs (2000) has called the end of politics. Rather
than coming together as a community to decide the nature of the schools their
children attend, parents are provided a directory of individual consumer
choices. This notion that choice in a market place is “cleaner” than the messy,
often contentious politics of a school board has moved into the realm of com-
mon sense, but it may represent a broader political demobilization and the
atrophying of Americans’ political skills and dispositions.
The entanglement of market language with the language of rights is remi-
niscent of other hybrid discourses by some reformers, such as equating the
transfer of market principles to education with the civil rights movement.
Scott (2012) reminds us that choice and individual rights is a double-edged
sword. Individual rights and parent choice were used by Whites in the South
to create private schools so that they would not have to send their children to
public schools with Black children. She also points out that while low-income
parents of color may be allowed limited choices within urban districts, they
do not have access to real choices beyond district boundaries. The kinds of
choices that reformers promote do not challenge the larger stratification sys-
tem that provides choices based on one’s zip code.
Privatizing the Policy Process

While we have mainly focused on ALEC’s goal of privatizing the public sec-
tor and discursively creating a new common sense, ALEC also raises impor-
tant questions about who should be making education policy and where
democracy resides in our political system. Ideally, formal democracy exists
within the state as we elect our representatives. Direct democracy exists
within civil society as we use our media to remain informed, form social

movements to create new demands on the state, and form labor unions to
protect ourselves against exploitation. However, the market sector has,
according to most analysts, amassed inordinate influence over both the state
and civil society, threatening political democracy either by using its fiscal
resources to buy political influence and control the media or replace political
democracy with choice in a quasi-market-place.
As a 501(c)(3), ALEC is classified as a civil society, non-profit, tax-
exempt organization, though it actually straddles all three sectors. As a largely
corporate-funded organization that promotes the interests of corporations, it
is located within the Market sector—essentially as a lobbying organization.
But unlike lobbying organizations, because it is also composed of state legis-
lators, it is located within the state sector. Following Ball’s (2009) observa-
tion that the private sector is increasingly colonizing the infrastructures of
policy and operating within the state, ALEC represents a unique combination
of “statework,” corporate lobbying, and think tank. While ALEC is in many
ways more in the tradition of a lobby group promoting corporate interests in
education, it provides a legally legitimate space for corporations to co-write
(not merely influence) model bills that, in turn, insert a business and market
logic, discourse and ideology into the public sector, promoting both the
financial and ideological interests of the corporate sector.
Related to this issue is the claim that neoliberal forms of network gover-
nance are replacing government or that the state is being “hollowed out”
through outsourcing to the private sector and the increased participation of
civil society in providing services once provided by the state (Rhodes, 1997).
Some see this hollowing-out process as a positive development, viewing the
market and civil society as more efficient and democratic. However, what our
analysis of ALEC shows is that in many cases, the state is not withdrawing or
being hollowed out, but rather colonized by corporate interests. The choice of
Thomas Jefferson as the inspiration of ALEC’s vision is ironic since
Jeffersonian democrats were inherently suspicious of financiers, bankers, and
industrialists, whom they viewed as the new aristocracy. However, ALEC has
systematically appropriated a Jeffersonian democratic discourse that is mar-
ket-based rather than political—a discourse of choice in a market place over
citizenship in a democracy—through which to promote its views.
Conclusion
There is growing awareness that new policy networks have emerged both
globally and in the United States, and that many cases have formed aggres-
sive new modalities of governance.9 Various researchers have identified sev-
eral policy entrepreneurs that represent key nodes within these networks.

These include venture philanthropists, think tanks, private “edubusinesses”

and their lobbyists, trade associations, advocacy organizations, legislators,
and social entrepreneurs. Rather than study the dense interrelationships
among ALEC and its network partners and strategic alliances, we have cho-
sen to look inside the black box of one particularly aggressive and successful
node within this network to examine at a micro-political level how it goes
about its policy work, a part of which is discursive.
While we have described particular education policies ALEC promotes
and the micro-political and discursive strategies it deploys, these are part of a
larger set of strategies aimed at reengineering public sector education around
the tenets of privatization and managerialism. Scott and DiMartino (2009)
have created a useful typology to explain how policy entrepreneurs play dif-
ferent synergistic roles in achieving their policy goals (see Appendix B).
Building on the “partners” and “rivals” roles in Minow’s (2002) work on
public–private partnerships, Scott and DiMartino (2009) developed an edu-
cational privatization typology based on privatization efforts in New York
City’s school reform that retains the partners and rivals categories, but adds
gatekeepers, managers, and profit seekers.
This typology is useful in summarizing ALEC’s larger strategic agenda as
it enacts several of these roles. In fact, three of the roles epitomize ALEC’s
central strategy: the formation of a partnership between public sector legisla-
tors (gatekeepers) and corporations (profit seekers). Most of ALEC’s policies
are aimed at creating rivals (charter schools, vouchers, private sector con-
tracting, tax credits, parent trigger, and anti-union measures) to public sector
provision of education services.
While most of the policies that ALEC promotes are discursively framed
by self-described reformers as “reforms,” we have demonstrated that the
New Right alliance is composed of an array of agendas, some that could be
thought of as reforms (as in the notion that charter schools might incubate
reform in public schools) and others viewed as radical attempts to privatize
public education and open it up to profit seekers. In fact, one of the most
effective discursive strategies of new policy networks has been to define
themselves as “reformers,” which positions educators, their association, and
their unions—labeled as the education establishment or educrats—as sup-
porters of the status quo or a return to an imagined golden age of public
schooling. In this way, neoliberal “reformers” from both political parties
frame themselves as modernizing and streamlining a previously inefficient,
inequitable, and unaccountable public schools system and, by extension,
Keynesian welfare state. Unless progressive educators can reframe the terms
of the debate, they will continue to be positioned as defenders of a past recon-
structed by neoliberals.

Implications for Policy Advocacy

While we have described the generally successful attempts by ALEC and its
network allies to shift public opinion and state-level policies toward neolib-
eral and managerialist policies, we have also suggested that the growth of
counter-networks has the potential to provide some balance. It is important to
understand that this is not exactly a David and Goliath struggle. In spite of the
post Citizens Unite influx of corporate money into the coffers of these net-
works, teachers unions, professional associations, progressive think tanks
and advocacy organizations, and incipient, but growing educator-led grass-
roots movements have been able to hold the line in many cases. In fact, a
group of political progressives have formed an ALEC-like counter organiza-
tion Called ALICE (American Legislative and Issue Campaign Exchange:
http://www.alicelaw.org), which “aims to provide a one-stop, web-based,
public library of progressive model laws on a wide variety of issues in state
and local policy” (Rogers, 2012).
One element of the success of neoliberal policy networks and organiza-
tions like ALEC is that they are proactive rather than reactive. This is, in part,
because they have a strong ideological alliance, a dense, well-funded net-
work, are committed to cross-sector advocacy, and engage effectively in both
political and discursive strategies. Progressive networks, on the other hand,
seem to lack a strong ideological alliance, have a more precarious policy
network, and have not been very politically or discursively effective (Kovaks
& Christie, 2009; Lakoff, 2004). In the education sector, teachers unions
have, with the notable exception of the Chicago Teachers Union (Gutstein &
Lipman, 2013), adopted the industrial model of defending bread and butter
issues rather than the social movement model that built the labor movement
(Rogers & Terriquez, 2009). While the development of counter-networks has
had some small successes, discursively these counter-networks have yet to
articulate a coherent counter-narrative that might reframe the neoliberal nar-
rative of freedom, individualism, meritocracy, versus a rigid, inefficient,
monopolistic, and oppressive public sector with its public bureaucracies and
obstructionist unions.
While increasing the effectiveness of traditional policy players like teach-
ers unions, education advocacy organizations, and professional associations
might have some impact, a more grassroots approach to countering neoliberal
policy networks is also underway. The global success of neoliberal modali-
ties of governance has spawned new modalities of political contention within
civil society which are also spreading globally. Notions of horizontalism,
public assemblies, and cooperativism, that began in the Southern Hemisphere
and traveled to the United States, resulting in Occupy Wall Street, are

developing new political and discursive strategies and experimenting with

new modalities of localized governance (Sitrin, 2012; Souza Santos, 2008).
Perhaps the signature success of the Occupy Movement was to discursively
delegitimize the dominant U.S. framing of equal opportunity and upward
social mobility and to discursively promote a new frame of the U.S. as a
deeply unequal society. As community organizations, grassroots teacher
organizations, and student activism grow, there is a possibility that a similar
reframing of education policy could ultimately emerge.
Implications for Educational Research

There are several issues confronting educational research in the context of
new neoliberal modalities of governance, each meriting more discussion than
can be provided here. One is the extent to which ALEC and its policy net-
works are changing the policy conversation and influencing the kinds of
research academics are undertaking, the topics they are choosing to pursue,
and the nature of the questions they are asking (Dumas & Anderson, 2014).
Moreover, as the state withdraws funding, universities become more depen-
dent on private sources (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2003). Not only is the policy
process becoming increasingly privatized, academic research is as well.
Academic researchers’ agendas are too often determined by venture philan-
thropy, private foundations and individuals, endowed chairs, government
funding priorities, and even direct corporate largesse. According to Ball
(2010), “higher education institutions are being displaced as knowledge bro-
kers, and at the same time ‘enterprised’ and ‘hybridised’, in a new education
policy knowledge market” (p. 124).
Another issue is the extent to which universities and educational research-
ers are imperceptibly incorporated into the discursive hegemony of neoliber-
alism that ALEC and its ideological allies promote. For instance, colleges of
education hire more economists (and pay them more) and fewer philoso-
phers. Researchers tend to actively study neoliberal reforms, seldom ques-
tioning their internal logic or the economic interests behind them (Biesta,
2007; Ozga, 2008; St. Clair & Belzer, 2007). As we noted above, an exhaus-
tive search of academic articles on ALEC turned up nothing, leaving us to
rely on the research of investigative journalists.
Finally, educational researchers are unable to compete with ALEC-like
organizations that are far more sophisticated in the ways they disseminate
information and reframe social issues. Research associations, such as the
American Educational Research Association (AERA), are often loath to enter
the policy conversation as advocates lest they be viewed as biased, ceding
this territory to proliferating think tanks, lobbyists, and ALEC-like organiza-
tions that seldom, if ever, base their proposals on rigorous research (Dumas
& Anderson, 2014).
Within the institutional field of education, there is a discursive battle being

fought to delegitimize previous discourses associated with public schooling
and the Keynesian Welfare State and replace them with neoliberal and neocon-
servative ones aimed at privatization. As Edelman (1978) and Lakoff (2008)
have pointed out, this battle will not be won by the better academic argument
or the most rigorous research, but rather by who has the funding and the ability
to more effectively frame the issues. Unless educators and educational research-
ers can articulate a compelling and proactive vision for public education and
build alliances across various constituencies and knowledge regimes as ALEC
and its networks have done, public education and the teaching profession may
be in for a protracted battle that they are ill prepared to win.
Appendix A
Model Bills Aimed at Privatizing Public Assets: Choice, Charters, Vouchers, and Tax
Credits.
1990s-2001 Model Bills (Pre-No Child
Left Behind [NCLB]) Promotes
Open Enrollment Act (1995) Allows students to attend any school in
the state and the state would pay the
costs of transporting students.
Education Accountability Act (1995) If a school district or school fails to
meet certain standards, then the state
can declare the district or school
“educationally bankrupt” and issue
vouchers to parents to subsidize
attendance at private schools
Charter Schools Act (1995) Allows states to create and operate
schools that would be exempt from
state laws and regulations, funded on
a per pupil rate like traditional public
schools.
Proposed Resolution on Straight A’s: Urges Congress to allow states to
Academic Achievement for All (1999) consolidate ESEA Elementary and
Secondary Education Act funding as
block grants so states would not have
to abide by Federal regulations.
School Board Freedom to Contract Allows outsourcing or contracting out
Act (1999) services to the private sector
Resolution Supporting Private Supports corporate and individual
Scholarship Tax Credits (2001) subsidization of private schools through
tax credits.
(continued)

Appendix A (continued)
2002-present Model Bills (Post-NCLB) Promotes
Channel One Resolution (2002) This resolution supports the use of
Channel One in public schools.
Individuals Disabilities Education Act Modifies the IDEA to fund private
Resolution (IDEA; 2002) school placement vouchers for special
education students, crating/supporting
private schools for special education
students.
Virtual Public Schools Act (2005) Says virtual or online schools should
be recognized as public schools and
provided with public monies.
The Smart Start Scholarship Program Provides vouchers to parents to
(2006) enroll their child in private pre-
schools. It also provides tax breaks
to corporations that fund these
scholarships/vouchers
The Great Schools Tax Credit Program Provides tax credits for families paying
Act (2009) private school tuition and creates
tax credits for corporations and
individuals who donate money to these
scholarships.
The Innovation Schools and School Creates an “innovation zone” for schools,
Districts Act (2009) essentially charter schools, that would
get public monies but not have to
comply with school district regulations,
including collective bargaining rights.
Next Generation Charter Schools Act Gives charter schools competitive
(2009) advantage over public schools.
Governors can appoint a separate
charter school board, removes limits on
number of charter schools.
Parent Trigger Act (2010) Allows parents with a majority vote
to opt for one of three choice-based
options for school reform—transforming
the school into a charter school,
supplying students from that school with
75% per pupil cost voucher, or closing
the school.

Model Bills Focusing on Teachers Unions, Tenure, and Certification.
1990s-2001 Model Bills (Pre-NCLB) Promotes

Career Ladders Opportunities Act Aimed at creating pay for teacher
(1995) performance programs by modifying
teaching contracts and limiting
tenure.
Teacher Choice Compensation Act Creates a program where teachers may
(2002) be eligible for performance-based
salary increases if they opt out of their
permanent contract and meet student
performance goals.
Teacher Quality and Recognition Authorizes taxpayer-funded teaching
Demonstration Act (2002) projects exempt from education
regulations regarding teacher
certification, tenure, recruitment, and
compensation.
Alternative Certification Act (2006) Requires states to enact alternative
certification programs for people with
subject area expertise.
Public School Employee Union Release Overturns union agreements where
Time Act (2010) union activities are compensated as
release time. The unions would have to
finance all release time arrangements
with school districts.
Teachers Right to Know Act (2010) This model legislation requires all
union staff salaries and benefits to be
disclosed to the public.
Bills Appealing to the New Managerialist, Middle Class.
Educational Enterprise Zone Act This model legislation creates zones with
(1995) public and private schools. Students
eligible for free lunch could attend any
school in the zone, being supplied with
vouchers for private schools.
Resolution Supporting the Principles of This resolution supports NCLB
NCLB (2006)
(continued)

The Public School Financial Requires schools to create easily
Transparency Act accessible data of school revenues and
expenditures, these are already public
documents and this law would require
local school boards to maintain a
separate database to do this.
Quality Education and Teacher and The filing of meritless lawsuits against
Principal Protection Act (2013). (This school districts, teachers and
is essentially a tort reform act) administrators, and other school
employees interferes with attempts to
ensure the quality of public education
. . . Meritless litigation also diverts
financial and personnel resources to
litigation defense activities, and reduces
the availability of such resources for
educational opportunities for students.
The Legislature finds that legislation to
deter meritless lawsuits and sanction
deliberately false reports against
educators is a rational and appropriate
method to address this compelling
public interest.
Bills Promoting Conservative Social and Moral Values.
1990s-2001 Model Bills (Pre-NCLB) Promotes
Drug-Free Schools Act (1995) Alters the 1986 Drug-Free Schools Act
by funneling more of the federal and
state money through a state drug-free
schools advisory committee before
reaching the schools as well as creating
local drug-free school committees that
would be responsible for approving
specific plans.
(continued)

Resolution on Non-Verified Science This resolution is concerned with the use

Curriculum Funding (no year on bill) of textbooks with unverified scientific
information promoting particular points
of view, designed to change students
behavior, attitudes or values, and/
or urge or instruct in political action
activities.
The Personal Financial Literacy Act This model bill requires students from
(2009) Grades 7 to 12 to receive instruction
in financial literacy and achieve
satisfactory completion in order to
graduate.
Founding Principles Act (2010) This model bill requires a semester-
long course on the “philosophical
understandings” of American
founders, as incorporated in the
Declaration of Independence,
Constitution, and Federalist Papers
Environmental Literacy Improvement The purpose of this act is to enhance
Act (2000, reapproved 2013) and improve the environmental
literacy of students and citizens in the
state. It focuses on making sure that
teaching is balanced and not designed
to change student behavior, attitudes,
or values and not include instruction
in political action skills nor encourage
political action activities.

Appendix B
Figure 1. Educational Privatization Typology.
Typology Definition Examples

Gatekeepers Organizations or individuals that Policymakers, district officials,
facilitate privatization policy courts, politicians
Managers Individuals or organizations EMOs, CMOs, intermediary
oriented toward whole school organizations, partner support
or partial school district organizations
governance.
Rivals Private sector organizations, Voucher advocates, charter
individuals who compete with schools/networks, EMOs,
traditional public schools CMOs, political groups
Partners Organizations or individuals Universities, community-based
who enter into collaborative organizations, businesses
relationships with schools/
districts
Profit Those who seek to make Curricula and test companies,
Seekers money and turn profits tutoring services, data analysis
from education, educational firms, food service providers,
services, etc. financial service organizations,
EMOs, CMOs, other business
interests
Source. Scott and DiMartino (2009).

Note. EMO = Education Management Organizations; CMO = Charter Management
Organizations.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article.
Notes
1. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has since then listed its
model bills on its website. See http://www.alec.org/model-legislation/
2. Here we are using “neoliberalism” as a broader term that encompasses economic
(neoclassical), cultural, and political dimensions.

3. Although business appears to oppose the older 19th-century model of efficiency,

some argue that the test-driven, outcomes-based approach they promote works
against producing the kind of creative, entrepreneurial, team- and project-ori-
ented business professional needed in the current high-tech workplace. Others
argue that in fact, only a relatively small number of those “symbolic analysts”
(Reich, 1991) are needed, and that the average worker needs only a modest level
of literacy and numeracy skills.
4. New public management and new managerialism both refer to the cross-sector
transference of market and business principles to the public sector. Throughout the
article, we will use the term new managerialism. Apple (2001) draws on this con-
cept to characterize a sector of middle-class professionals and Washington bureau-
crats who support current reforms based on what they see as their attempt to use
new managerialist principles to modernize pubic education. New managerialism is
often viewed as the manifestation of neoliberalism at the institutional level.
5. Common Cause has taken ALEC to court over its tax-exempt status. There
has been considerable controversy over ALEC’s tax status and whether ALEC
is a lobby group and therefore not eligible for tax-exempt status. According to
Businessweek, “Part of ALEC’s mission is to present industry-backed legislation
as grass-roots work” (Greeley, 2012). ALEC denies that it engages in lobbying
since as a lobby group, it could not deduct membership dues and it would have to
be more transparent. ALEC is a new breed of policy actor, since it is technically
neither a think tank nor a lobbying group.
6. In fact, the new common sense that the ALEC policy network has created over
the past 30 years has likely influenced the policies in Race to the Top, which
include lifting charter school caps and using test scores to evaluate teachers.
Although ALEC draws heavily in its publications on Milton Freidman’s work,
even Freidman, influenced by his mentor, Henry Simon, was suspicious of cor-
porate monopolies and even a corporate take-over of the state if the state grew
too large (Alperovitz, 2012).
7. The notion that ALEC promoted a “new right” agenda for education is not new.
As early as 1985, Sandra Martin wrote a report critical of ALEC for the National
Center for Policy Alternatives titled “The New Right’s Education Agenda for the
States: A Legislator’s Briefing Book.”
8. At least until recently, when it dissolved its safety and elections task force in the
face of backlash against neoconservative policies.
9. Parker (2007) suggests that the existence of a proliferation of networks does not nec-
essarily indicate network governance, that is “steering, setting directions, and influ-
encing behavior” (p. 114). Goodwin (2009) suggests that to determine whether an
increase in networks results in a dispersal or concentration of power, one has to ana-
lyze power relations, level of resource dependency, and the distribution of capacities.
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Author Biographies
Gary L. Anderson is a professor in the Department of Administration, Leadership and
Technology in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development
at New York University. A former high school teacher and principal, he has published
on topics such as critical ethnography, action research, school micropolitics, and
school reform and leadership. With Kathryn Herr, he has co-authored two books on
action research;The Action Research Dissertation: A Guide for Students and Faculty.
(2014, 2nd Ed., , Sage Pub.) and Studying your own school: An educator’s guide to
practitioner action research.(2nd ed. 2007, Corwin Press). His most recent book is
Advocacy Leadership: Toward a Post-Reform Agenda (2009, Routledge).
Liliana Montoro Donchik is a doctoral candidate in Educational Leadership at New
York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.
She is currently working on her dissertation which explores the transition issues for
formerly incarcerated youth returning to school and community. Ms. Donchik was a
special education teacher for 8 years in public schools in San Francisco, Oakland, and
Palo Alto. She has been a research assistant at the Vera Institute of Justice, the Center
for Court Innovation, the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education, and the Social
Science Research Council. Ms. Donchik is currently consulting with the New York
City Department of Education in the Office of Research and Development.

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Educational Policy

Privatizing Schooling and Policy Making: The American Legislative

The online version of this article can be found at:

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>> OnlineFirst Version of Record - May 16, 2014

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Gary L. Anderson1 and Liliana Montoro Donchik1

1New York University, New York, USA

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New Policy Entrepreneurs and New Policy

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disembedded from out-of-school factors that impact children (Berliner,

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New Modalities and Strategies of Governance

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An example of a discursive strategy was the replacement of the term equal

A Brief Overview of ALEC

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Insurance, and Economic Development; Communications and Technology;

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Figure 1. ALEC’s network

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Figure 2. ALEC Education Task Force members.

Force Summits; articles focusing on education in ALEC’s journal Inside

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ALEC obtains tax-exempt status by calling itself an educational organiza-

ALEC and New Governance

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ALEC was founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage

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Figure 3. Network of organizations that oppose ALEC.

Data Analysis: ALEC’s Political Goals

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Model Bills Focusing on the Privatization of Public Assets

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Bills promoting either the privatization of public assets or the creation of

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A one-to-one systematic link from model bills to the financial interests of

Model Bills Focusing on Teachers Unions, Tenure, and

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Model Bills Appealing to a New Managerialist, Professional

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Bills Promoting Conservative Social and Moral Values

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ALEC’s Political Strategies

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the Constitution. While focusing on the state-level ALEC is helping to form

Flying Under the Radar

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legislatures are public organizations, many have enacted exemptions to pub-

Shotgun Approach to Model Bills

Ongoing Networking and Advisement

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instance, Sen. Joseph Kyrillos (R-Monmouth) was promoting the Parent

Annual State Report Cards

Member Dues Resource Stream

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ALEC’s Discursive Strategies

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Using the Language of Individual Rights and Choices to Promote