Former AAA Fund blogger Lee Fang has a great investigative article up in the Nation (“How Online Learning Companies Bought America’s Schools) on how the Gates Foundation is giving conservative think tank American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) nearly half a million – $400,000 – to sponsor education reform bills at the state level. ALEC is not a friendly organization – it doesn’t promote the health and welfare of underserved communities, or anything that you might associate with the good that the Gates Foundation does. It is the main policy organizing arm of the right wing that pushes the most heinous anti-immigrant (SB 1070 clones), anti-civil rights (they push all the restrictive voter bills), anti-worker, anti-health care reform bills at the state level, and they try to do it across all the states. Basically, if a large corporation like Blue Cross Blue Shield has a bill they want to promote, they give money to ALEC to help them get state legislators to sponsor and move their bills along. 85% of their funding comes from corporations.

I can say this from first hand experience – I spent more than a year fighting anti-immigrant, anti-worker policies across the states that ALEC was pushing. And now everyone knows the terrible impact that they can have, from Arizona to Alabama.</rant>

Going back to Gates funding an anti-teacher agenda. Crooks and Liars has additional analysis:

Education for profit is lucrative and alluring, especially to people with large sums of money parked and waiting for investment in big-profit items. So when Bill Gates claims to stand for education reform in this country, I place him squarely in the category of those who stand to profit from privatized education.

Teachers are up against a wide range and nexus of for-profit education corporations, companies that make money by performing measurements of No Child Left Behind (SchoolNet is one), venture capital firms (led by KleinerPerkins), hedge funds and finance types, elected officials, and foundations (Gates, Eli Broad, Dell, etc.) which are seeking to push anti-union and anti-teacher proposals. These groups hire high-priced lobbyists to promote their agenda:

Levesque noted that reform efforts had failed because the opposition had time to organize. Next year, Levesque advised, reformers should “spread” the unions thin “by playing offense” with decoy legislation. Levesque said she planned to sponsor a series of statewide reforms, like allowing taxpayer dollars to go to religious schools by overturning the so-called Blaine Amendment, “even if it doesn’t pass…to keep them busy on that front.” She also advised paycheck protection, a unionbusting scheme, as well as a state-provided insurance program to encourage teachers to leave the union and a transparency law to force teachers unions to show additional information to the public. Needling the labor unions with all these bills, Levesque said, allows certain charter bills to fly “under the radar.”

Public sector workers have been under attack this cycle, and there’s no doubt that teachers don’t have the clout to combat these bills on their own. 

Lobbyists like Levesque have made 2011 the year of virtual education reform, at last achieving sweeping legislative success by combining the financial firepower of their corporate clients with the seeming legitimacy of privatization-minded school-reform think tanks and foundations. Thanks to this synergistic pairing, policies designed to boost the bottom lines of education-technology companies are cast as mere attempts to improve education through technological enhancements, prompting little public debate or opposition. In addition to Florida, twelve states have expanded virtual school programs or online course requirements this year. This legislative juggernaut has coincided with a gold rush of investors clamoring to get a piece of the K-12 education market. It’s big business, and getting bigger: One study estimated that revenues from the K-12 online learning industry will grow by 43 percent between 2010 and 2015, with revenues reaching $24.4 billion.

Needless to say, I don’t think online education is the main solution to our education crisis. And I’m definitely opposed to companies profiting from replacing real live teachers with video teachers. That’s not a substitute teacher, that’s a virtual teacher, as in virtually no education.

Thirteen other states have enacted laws to expand or initiate so-called school choice programs this year.

Meanwhile, ALEC has continued to slip laws written by education-tech lobbyists onto the books. In Tennessee, Republican State Representative Harry Brooks didn’t even bother changing the name of ALEC’s Virtual Public Schools Act before introducing it as his own legislation. Asked by the Knoxville News Sentinel’s Tom Humphrey where he got the idea for the bill, Brooks readily admitted that a K12 Inc. lobbyist helped him draft it. Governor Bill Haslam signed Brooks’s bill into law in May. The statute allows parents to apply nearly every dollar the state typically spends per pupil, almost $6,000 in most areas, to virtual charter schools, as long as they are authorized by the state.

It’s worse than charter schools – it’s video schools. The onslaught is coming, be forewarned and arm yourself with knowledge.

– Caroline