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By 2020, analysis of state voucher and school choice programs reveals that the American Legislative Exchange Council's systematic education privatization campaign has achieved stunning success, with ALEC model legislation forming the foundation of voucher, charter school, and education savings account programs in the vast majority of states with such policies. Research tracking ALEC's multi-decade campaign shows that states implementing school choice programs overwhelmingly adopted ALEC's template legislation, with the organization's Education and Workforce Development Task Force successfully deploying model bills across red-state legislatures to systematically defund public education and transfer billions in taxpayer dollars to private, religious, and for-profit education corporations.
The scope of ALEC's achievement is remarkable: 349,923 students across 13 states, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico use private school tuition vouchers based substantially on ALEC models, while another 217,194 students in 18 states use tax-credit scholarships derived from ALEC's 'Great Schools Tax Credit Program Act' (approved 2005). Education savings account programs, pioneered in Arizona following ALEC's 'Family Education Savings Account Act' template (2008), have expanded to multiple states with ALEC-affiliated legislators leading implementation. The pattern is unmistakable: states with Republican legislative control and ALEC presence systematically adopt nearly identical privatization schemes, demonstrating centrally coordinated corporate lobbying rather than organic state policy development.
ALEC's success stems from its unique corporate-legislative structure. For-profit education corporations including K12 Inc. (online charter operator), Pearson (textbook and testing giant), and education technology companies pay between $7,000 and $50,000 annually for ALEC membership, receiving seats and votes on ALEC's Education Task Force where they draft model legislation alongside state legislators behind closed doors with no press or public access. This pay-to-play structure allows corporations to literally write laws that channel public education funds to their businesses, then deploy those laws simultaneously across dozens of states through ALEC's legislative member network. Major funders driving ALEC's education agenda include Koch Industries (via Americans for Prosperity), the DeVos family (via American Federation for Children), and the Bradley Foundation—the same network funding climate denial, union-busting, and voter suppression campaigns.
The privatization infrastructure ALEC built from 2005-2020 demonstrates systematic state capture. Wisconsin's voucher program expansion (following ALEC's 2010 States and Nation Policy Summit focus on education privatization) reveals the pattern: initial income limits of 175% poverty rise to 300% poverty by 2015, allowing families earning $78,637 (above state median income) to access vouchers. By 2020, Wisconsin data shows nearly 80% of voucher participants never attended public schools, meaning the program subsidizes families already paying private tuition rather than helping students leave 'failing' public schools as ALEC claims. Ohio's EdChoice voucher expansion (2020) sees private school enrollment jump from 7% in 2019 to 55% in 2023 as ALEC-style universal eligibility is implemented. Arizona's ESA program, initially for special needs students (2011), expands to universal eligibility by 2022, with 80% of participants never having attended public schools according to Grand Canyon Institute analysis.
Research comprehensively debunks ALEC's education quality claims. The National Education Policy Center's systematic reviews of ALEC's 'Report Card on American Education' (published annually since the 1990s) find that ALEC's recommendations 'draw selectively from advocacy groups to make claims that are not supported in the wider, peer-reviewed literature' and that 'the research ALEC highlights is quite shoddy and unsuitable for supporting its recommendations.' Brookings Institution studies show voucher programs consistently produce negative or neutral student outcomes compared to public schools, with Louisiana and Indiana voucher students performing significantly worse than public school peers. Studies in Florida, Ohio, and D.C. similarly find no evidence that vouchers improve educational outcomes, while documenting massive resource diversion from democratically accountable public schools to unregulated private institutions.
The financial impact on public education is devastating. By 2020, billions in state education funding flows to private institutions through ALEC-modeled voucher mechanisms, with states like Wisconsin, Indiana, Arizona, and Florida leading in public school defunding. The Economic Policy Institute calculates that voucher programs in major cities reduce public school district funding by hundreds of millions annually, forcing teacher layoffs, program cuts, and school closures in the public systems that serve 90% of American students. This aligns perfectly with Milton Friedman's vision articulated at ALEC's 2006 conference: vouchers are 'a step towards abolishing the public school system.' ALEC's 2020 achievement represents the culmination of a 37-year campaign (since ALEC began promoting vouchers in 1983) to systematically privatize American public education, transfer democratic governance to corporate control, and redirect public resources to private profit—a kleptocratic transformation of education enabled by legalized corporate capture of state legislatures.