Privatizing Schooling and Policy Making

EPXXXX10.1177/0895904814528794Educational PolicyAnderson and Donchik 528794research-article2014

Article

Educational Policy 2016, Vol. 30(2) 322–364 Privatizing Schooling © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: and Policy Making: The sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav 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, NY, USA Corresponding Author: Gary L. Anderson, New York University, 100 Bleecker St. 12E, New York, NY 10012, USA. Email: [email protected]

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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 several 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 significant 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 legislatures 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. educators, represented by their professional associations and unions, had less competition 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 liberalism,” 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 powerful policy networks aimed at disembedding markets and individuals from regulatory policies and social welfare protections. Schooling is viewed as

Downloaded from epx.sagepub.com by guest on February 5, 2016 324 Educational Policy 30(2) 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 networks 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 embedded liberalism and its replacement by libertarian, free market-friendly policies (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 networks (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 success at privatizing significant portions of public education is well documented, 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 advocacy 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 governance, such as its use of internal “partnerships,” its location as a node within

Downloaded from epx.sagepub.com by guest on February 5, 2016 Anderson and Donchik 325 larger policy networks, its “think tank” status, its complex or creative political 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 strategies 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 education that has made important inroads into discrediting embedded liberalism and promoting a free-market, neoliberal knowledge regime (Aasen, Proitz, & Sandberg, 2014).

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 private sector actors but also through new modalities of governance and effective 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 governance through interlocking boards, aggressive forms of philanthropy, or social entrepreneurialism. Strategies can be political or discursive. An example 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 significant policy change in a majority of states, including lifting caps on charter schools and implementing new teacher evaluation models based on student test scores.

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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 organizations 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 partnership of America’s state legislators, members of the private sector, the federal 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 education, 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,

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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 neoliberalism 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 entrepreneurs, 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

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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 politically 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

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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 special 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 different 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 focusing on K-12 education, although model bills were also released that focus on higher education.

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ALEC obtains tax-exempt status by calling itself an educational organization 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 neoliberal 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 website 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 ideologically 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 coding, 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 repetition of themes). All of these different approaches to the texts allowed for triangulation 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 network governance, and its formation parallels the historical period in which new modalities of governance were emerging.

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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 organizations, 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 conservatives (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

Downloaded from epx.sagepub.com by guest on February 5, 2016 332 Educational Policy 30(2) 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 involvement 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, charter 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 professional associations and academic researchers, are contesting their neoliberal agenda. Furthermore, new network modalities of governance are not limited to the political right. New neoliberal policy networks have spawned a series of progressive 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 organizations. 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 governance (including funding), and the political and discursive strategies that conservative and neoliberal advocacy organizations have so successfully deployed.

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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 privatization 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 transfer of new managerialist principles to the public sector. These themes

Downloaded from epx.sagepub.com by guest on February 5, 2016 334 Educational Policy 30(2) 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 neoliberal and libertarian principals of its founders and the economic self-interest 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 ideological 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 profession, 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 organized 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 particular policy frame or ideology, it is often difficult to discern where policy

Downloaded from epx.sagepub.com by guest on February 5, 2016 Anderson and Donchik 335 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 education 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 corporations 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 education industries to prosper. For instance, EMO franchises and tutoring companies 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, particularly 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 interested 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.

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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 privatization, 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,” education is highly labor intensive, making it hard to make a profit without reducing labor costs. ALEC publications however do not present this argument, 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 parents opt for private schools, which are typically non-union (Enlow & Ladner, 2005).

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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 sector 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 language of new managerialism that appealed to new democrats, while its equity provisions and promise of increased federal funding attracted some old democrats, 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 “financial 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, charter 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,

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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-regulation, 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 agendas. 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, organizations 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.

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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 strategies. 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 corporations 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

Downloaded from epx.sagepub.com by guest on February 5, 2016 340 Educational Policy 30(2) 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 standards, more research and media attention in education has shifted to the federal 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 analysis 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 continues to be a state-level concern. Through coordination among network members, 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

Downloaded from epx.sagepub.com by guest on February 5, 2016 Anderson and Donchik 341 legislatures are public organizations, many have enacted exemptions to public records law for legislative drafting offices. This makes a systematic analysis 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 mitigating 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, legislative 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, representing Pfizer. Several other legislators were promoting ALEC bills. For

Downloaded from epx.sagepub.com by guest on February 5, 2016 342 Educational Policy 30(2) 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 legislatures 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 charter schools, New Jersey added a provision that allows private for-profit entities 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 rankings 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

Downloaded from epx.sagepub.com by guest on February 5, 2016 Anderson and Donchik 343 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 education 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 organization, 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 similar 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

Downloaded from epx.sagepub.com by guest on February 5, 2016 344 Educational Policy 30(2) 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 individualism and meritocracy. This discursive interplay among these four ideological 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. (2014) 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 previous 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 analysts 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.

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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 diminishing 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, accountability 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 conservatives. The new managerialist middle class may not be ready to jettison public schools, but are more likely to respond positively to terms like “accountability,” “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

Downloaded from epx.sagepub.com by guest on February 5, 2016 346 Educational Policy 30(2) accountability per se, but rather the consequences of not meeting the desig- nated standards. These consequences are for the school to be declared “educationally 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 improvement 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 seldom means choosing among public school options. The goal appears to be the creation of more non-union, private sector choices. This discourse of individual 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

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Act is promoted by wealthy funders and “because it outsources school governance to Educational Management Organizations who have no obligation to (and often no physical presence in) the community, the parent trigger ultimately 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, homeschooling, 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 promotes, 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 common 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 system 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 sector and discursively creating a new common sense, ALEC also raises important 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

Downloaded from epx.sagepub.com by guest on February 5, 2016 348 Educational Policy 30(2) 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 legislators, 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 governance 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 market-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 aggressive new modalities of governance.9 Various researchers have identified several policy entrepreneurs that represent key nodes within these networks.

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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 chosen 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 different 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 educational 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 legislators (gatekeepers) and corporations (profit seekers). Most of ALEC’s policies are aimed at creating rivals (charter schools, vouchers, private sector contracting, 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 supporters 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.

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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 neoliberal 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 networks, teachers unions, professional associations, progressive think tanks and advocacy organizations, and incipient, but growing educator-led grassroots movements have been able to hold the line in many cases. In fact, a group of political progressives have formed an ALEC-like counter organization 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 organizations 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 network, 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 narrative 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 teachers 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 modalities 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

Downloaded from epx.sagepub.com by guest on February 5, 2016 Anderson and Donchik 351 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 networks 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 philanthropy, 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 researchers are imperceptibly incorporated into the discursive hegemony of neoliberalism 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 exhaustive 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 organizations that seldom, if ever, base their proposals on rigorous research (Dumas & Anderson, 2014).

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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 neoconservative 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 researchers 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)

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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.

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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. 2002-present Model Bills (Post-NCLB) Promotes 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)

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Appendix A (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)

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Appendix A (continued)

2002-present Model Bills (Post-NCLB) Promotes 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.

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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 author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication 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.

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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-oriented 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 corporate 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 influencing 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 analyze 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 prac- titioner action research. (2007, 2nd ed., 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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