Alabama Education, Environment & Working Families Bills

Overview

Each legislator receives separate letter grades for K-12, Higher Education, Environment, and Working Families based on how they vote on scored bills. Grades reflect whether a legislator's voting record supports or opposes policy in each area as determined by our scoring criteria.

We pull all bills from the Alabama Legislature via LegiScan and filter for education-related legislation using keyword analysis. Each bill is assigned a relevance score (0-100) based on how strongly its title and description relate to education policy.

Bills scoring 30 or above are included in the tracker. Topics we look for include:

• School funding and appropriations
• Teacher pay, benefits, and working conditions
• Curriculum, library materials, and instructional policy
• School choice, vouchers, and charter schools
• School safety and discipline
• Testing and accountability
• Special education
• Higher education, tuition, and financial aid

Each education bill that goes to a roll call vote is scored as one of three values:

• +1 (Pro-Education) — The bill increases funding, improves teacher pay or working conditions, expands student access, strengthens accountability, supports special needs students, improves school safety, or enhances curriculum quality.
• -1 (Anti-Education) — The bill cuts funding, restricts educational access, weakens accountability, defunds public schools without safeguards, or removes student protections.
• 0 (Neutral) — The bill is ceremonial, tangentially related to education, or has a genuinely mixed impact.

Bills are initially scored by AI analysis and then reviewed manually for accuracy. Neutral bills (scored 0) do not affect legislator grades.

Each bill is categorized as:

• K-12 — Primarily affects public schools, K-12 students, and teachers
• Higher Ed — Primarily affects colleges, universities, and higher education
• Both — Affects both K-12 and higher education (counts toward both grades)

This categorization is based on the bill's subtopics. A bill about "college tuition" is Higher Ed; a bill about "teacher pay" is K-12; a bill about "education funding" that covers both may be categorized as Both.

Identifying Environment Bills

In addition to education bills, we also track environmentally relevant legislation. Bills are identified using keyword analysis for environmental topics including:

• Air quality and emissions
• Water quality, clean water, and wastewater
• Land use, wetlands, and conservation
• Renewable energy and fossil fuels
• Wildlife and endangered species
• Waste management and hazardous materials
• Climate resilience and environmental regulation

Scoring Environment Bills

Each environmental bill is scored as:

• +1 (Pro-Environment) — The bill strengthens pollution controls, protects clean water/air, promotes renewable energy, funds conservation, protects wildlife, or improves waste management.
• -1 (Anti-Environment) — The bill weakens environmental regulations, rolls back protections, increases pollution risk, deregulates polluters, or reduces conservation funding.
• 0 (Neutral) — The bill is ceremonial, tangentially related, or has a genuinely mixed impact.

A single bill can be scored for both education and environment separately if it is relevant to both areas. The same legislator vote may contribute to both their education grade and their environment grade.

Identifying Working Families Bills

We also track bills that directly affect working families and everyday Alabamians. Bills are identified using keyword analysis for topics including:

• Healthcare access and Medicaid expansion
• Wages, minimum wage, and labor protections
• Affordable housing and tenant rights
• Consumer protection and predatory lending
• Grocery taxes and cost of living
• Childcare and family leave
• Utility costs and broadband access
• Food security and SNAP benefits
• Criminal justice fines and fees
• Public transportation

Scoring Working Families Bills

Each working families bill is scored as:

• +1 (Pro-Family) — The bill expands healthcare, reduces grocery taxes, raises wages, protects consumers, lowers utility costs, funds affordable housing, supports childcare, expands broadband, or reduces fines/fees on low-income people.
• -1 (Anti-Family) — The bill cuts healthcare, gives corporate tax breaks without community benefit, weakens consumer protections, limits workers' rights, deregulates utilities/lenders, or increases fees on low-income people.
• 0 (Neutral) — The bill is ceremonial, tangentially related, or has a genuinely mixed impact.

A single bill can be scored across all three domains (education, environment, and working families) if it is relevant to each. The same legislator vote may contribute to multiple grades.

For each legislator, we look at every scored bill they voted on:

• A Yea vote on a +1 bill earns +1 point
• A Nay vote on a +1 bill earns -1 point
• A Yea vote on a -1 bill earns -1 point
• A Nay vote on a -1 bill earns +1 point
• Absent/NV votes earn 0 points and are excluded from the grade calculation

The raw score is then normalized to a percentage:

Percentage = (raw_score + active_votes) / (2 * active_votes) * 100

This formula applies to all four grades (K-12, Higher Ed, Environment, and Working Families). It maps a perfect supportive record to 100% and a perfect opposing record to 0%. The percentage is converted to a letter grade:

Legislators with fewer than 3 scored votes in a category receive N/A instead of a letter grade. This minimum threshold prevents a single vote from producing a misleading grade. A legislator may have an education grade but no environment grade (or vice versa) depending on which bills they voted on.

Vote Data Availability

Grades are based on roll call votes — instances where each legislator's individual vote is recorded. In Alabama, some bills pass on voice votes where individual positions are not recorded; those votes cannot be included in grades.

Our data covers the 2021 through 2026 legislative sessions, with roll call vote records for over 100 legislators in each session. Grades are updated automatically as new roll call votes are recorded.

What Grades Do and Don't Mean

• Grades reflect voting record only — they do not account for bill sponsorship, committee work, advocacy, or other legislative activity.
• A minimum of 3 votes is required before a grade is assigned. Even so, legislators with fewer votes may have grades that are less representative than those with many votes.
• Bill scores represent our assessment of whether a bill supports or opposes education or environmental policy. Reasonable people may disagree on some classifications.

Data Sources

• Bill data and vote records: LegiScan API
• Bill classification: Keyword analysis + AI review (Claude by Anthropic)
• Updates: Data refreshes automatically twice daily on weekdays