Failed ALEC Policy - Costs Milw/Racine Schools $75 Million per Year

Private school vouchers from WEAC on Vimeo.

From ALEC Exposed

Through ALEC, corporations, ideologues, and their politician allies voted to spend public tax dollars to subsidize private K-12 education and attack professional teachers and teachers' unions by:

• Promoting voucher programs that drain public schools of resources by using taxpayer dollars to subsidize private school profits, and specifying that those schools must remain unregulated. Voucher programs have been pushed in the following ways:
• Offering private school vouchers with "universal eligibility" (using taxpayer dollars to subsidize private schools for the rich and others); "means-tested eligibility," (using poverty as the first domino in an effort to privatize public schools); and "universal eligibility with means-tested scholarship." (Here, "scholarship" means using taxpayer dollars to pay private school tuition and/or profits.)
• Giving tax credits to parents who send their kids to private schools, (see this bill, this bill, and this bill) and to corporations that donate to scholarships for private schools.
• Creating a scheme to deem public schools "educationally bankrupt" to rationalize giving taxpayer dollars to almost completely unregulated private schools, rather than addressing any problems.
• Back-dooring privatization by creating voucher programs to subsidize unregulated, for-profit schools or religious schools for specific subsets of students, such as foster children, or children of military families.

Undermining Protections for Students With Disabilities

The ALEC Special Needs Scholarship Act has been introduced in Wisconsin as AB 110 by Rep. Michelle Litjens, and co-sponsored in the Senate by Leah Vukmir, who was an ALEC "Legislator of the Year" in 2009.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction said:

This bill strips special education students of due process rights and rights to services. It allows for the segregation of students based on disability. It will devastate funding for public education in select districts. It will result in the largest expansion of private school regulation ever seen in Wisconsin and, at the end of the day, no one will have any data to show if it resulted in a better education.

Another example of failed policy distributed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, pushed by ALEC state legislators.  Hurting our children - damaging our public schools.

UPDATE (snips):

New Report Exposes Bradley Foundation Funding Behind“Massive” Campaign to Promote School Privatization

by Harriet Rowan — April 19, 2013 - 3:58pm

In a new report, entitled “P is for Payoff: Inside the Bradley Foundation’s Campaign to Privatize Education in Wisconsin,” the non-profit activist group One Wisconsin Now has detailed the Bradley Foundation’s funding of a coordinated campaign to promote school privatization in Wisconsin and across the nation.

The report “reveals a web of right-wing groups are part of a $31 million-plus propaganda campaign pushing a massive privatization of public education in Wisconsin. Underwriting the effort is the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation, headed by Gov. Scott Walker's campaign co-chair, Michael Grebe."

Read the whole thing

>>>HERE<<<<