美国国家公共电台 NPR Betsy DeVos Speech Greeted By Protesters She Calls 'Defenders Of The Status Quo'

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

President Trump 1's education secretary, Betsy DeVos, is going to be speaking to the annual meeting of the American Legislative 2 Exchange Council or ALEC in Denver today. And her appearance drew hundreds of protesters who marched yesterday from the State Capitol Building to the hotel that is hosting this event.

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UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: Resist. Resist. Resist.

GREENE: Resist they are saying. Now, for more on ALEC and why these protesters are yelling resist and are very upset, let's turn to Anya Kamenetz from the NPR Ed team. Anya, good morning.

ANYA KAMENETZ, BYLINE 3: Hi, David.

GREENE: So could you start by just reminding us, what is ALEC?

KAMENETZ: So it's a group founded by conservative activists 4 in 1973. And it brings together mostly Republican state lawmakers with corporate 5 lobbyists and some free market conservatives. And all together, they write model bills. And these bills on all sorts of topics get adopted around the country often with very few changes.

GREENE: And this is something we see in legislative bodies around the country often, I mean, groups like this who do a lot of the work on policy and lobby to have the policy put in place. So what exactly is ALEC's education agenda?

KAMENETZ: So ALEC really is the granddaddy of this kind of way of producing legislation. And they wrote the original school voucher 6 bill back in the 1980s, bringing public money to private schools. They've been major champions of charter schools, of home schooling 7, of similar voucher models like education tax credits, tax credits scholarships. And they also have a sideline in promoting technology in schools. So their chief corporate sponsor in the education realm for many years has been K12 Inc., which is a online for-profit schools chain.

GREENE: So just listening to some of the things you're talking about there, I mean, vouchers 8 and charter schools and tax credits, I mean, this - it sounds a lot like Betsy DeVos has talked about. And it sounds like what President Trump has talked about, I mean, when he said that she would be his choice to lead the Education Department.

KAMENETZ: Yes. And they're - that is no accident, David. The relationship between DeVos and ALEC goes back many, many years. Her organization that she chaired until she became secretary, the American Federation 9 for Children, has supported ALEC financially. DeVos and her husband held stock in K12 Inc., which as I mentioned, was a corporate - is a longtime corporate sponsor of ALEC. And her father-in-law actually received an award from ALEC many years ago. So yes, there's a very, very strong relationship between the two.

GREENE: And is that strong relationship what protesters are angry about?

KAMENETZ: Well, you know, ALEC's drawn 10 a variety of protests from many different types of groups. Teachers unions don't like them because they back policies that tend to weaken those unions such as performance pay over tenure 11. And then, of course, there are protesters that say that the whole process of having these private companies writing legislation, you know, very closely working in influencing state legislatures, that that's not the most democratic way to make policies or laws.

GREENE: So Betsy DeVos is no stranger to controversy 12 since she has come into this job. What do you expect to hear from her today?

KAMENETZ: You know, she's likely to talk, as she usually does, about the importance of school choice and even more so about state leadership. It's kind of an awkward moment for this because the Trump budget requests that we saw in February had a lot of policies or proposals for school vouchers and school choice on the federal level. And those were just kind of like zeroed out, X'd out by the House Republicans just last week. And so if there's going to be continued growth or expansion of school choice policies, it's probably going to happen on the state level. And ALEC is going to continue to be a big part of that.

GREENE: Speaking to NPR's Anya Kamenetz, who is part of the NPR Ed team. Anya, thanks a lot, we appreciate it.

KAMENETZ: Thank you.