In a stunning move, even by his standards, the administration of Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy killed a report by state economists that showed Alaska’s teacher pay isn’t quite what it used to be.
According to an op-ed published by Dan Robinson, the research chief for the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development, and reporting by the Alaska Beacon, staff in the Dunleavy administration killed the report just days before it was slated for publication in the October edition of the state-produced Alaska Economic Trends magazine.
“We spent nearly a week trying to find out what the governor’s office’s concerns were. There was nothing unusual about the article to us — we’ve written about teachers before, and the article included typical information about wages, tenure, job counts, and comparisons with employment and wage data from other states,” Robinson wrote in the editorial. “I hope Alaskans are aware that there is a layer of state government that is supposed to be nonpartisan. … At our best, we help any administration with our subject-matter expertise and experience, but we do a disservice to the state if we let ourselves be sucked into politically motivated action or inaction.”
[More: Read the report the Dunleavy administration killed]
The report, a copy of which was obtained by the Alaska Beacon, isn’t particularly scathing, but it does throw cold water on the long-standing conservative argument that teachers are overpaid compared to student performance. Alaska was the best-paying state for teachers in the 80s and 90s, but the research shows that hasn’t been the case for the last 20 years as Alaska’s teacher wages stagnated and other states boosted pay.
Alaska went from the best-paying state for teachers to tenth, according to the report, with an average annual salary of $73,722. The report also showed that Alaska’s wage premium over the Lower 48 has nearly vanished over the last two decades, that Alaska’s losing ground to neighboring states in terms of wages, that Alaska’s teacher pay isn’t keeping up with inflation and that younger teachers are earning less than what longer-serving teachers were making at the same point in their career.
It also confirms many of the anecdotes we’ve heard in the Alaska Legislature about a hollowing out of the teacher workforce, as young teachers aren’t sticking around as long as they once were. That’s resulting in a workforce that has a smaller portion of younger teachers and a more significant portion of teachers who are nearing retirement.
What’s particularly surprising about the Dunelavy administration’s decision to quash the report — and Department of Labor Commissioner Cathy Muñoz’s claim that it “deviated from the publication’s standard of neutrality” — is that the report doesn’t even come close to attributing any of this to the actions of the Dunelavy administration.
Instead, it shows that the troubles facing Alaska’s teachers have been in the making for some 20 years, a product of the state’s collective failure to keep pace with neighboring states or inflation. It also frames Alaska’s teacher recruitment problems in the national picture, where many states are having trouble recruiting and retaining teachers. It notes that the issues go beyond teacher pay.
The report makes no mention or inference to Dunelavy’s controversial veto of $87.4 million of new school funding this year, half of what the Legislature approved as a one-time boost amid growing calls for increased school funding.
Why it matters
The debate over school funding and teacher pay isn’t going anywhere soon. While the report doesn’t come close to blaming the governor for the current state of things, it also doesn’t echo the governor’s narrative that things are going alright for Alaska’s teachers. Despite a bipartisan call for increased school funding, which was reflected in the Legislature’s $174 million boost to school funding, the Dunleavy administration has regularly battled that narrative and offered misleading reports to the Legislature that inflated the amount of money schools had available to them.
What’s clear is that the Dunleavy administration is deeply resistant to funding public schools above the status quo and is willing to interfere with the work of the state’s nonpartisan economists when it interferes with his rationale.
In the big picture, that attitude ought to raise alarm bells for Alaskans.
Robinson said in his editorial that he’ll continue to fight for the article’s publication but said what happens next will determine whether Alaska is a worthwhile place to work.
“Nonpolitical state government professionals must be willing to initiate hard conversations when an administration oversteps. Unless we stand up in these situations, the state risks losing things like the objectivity and political neutrality of a 50-plus-year economic publication like Trends,” he said. “We will continue to try to get the governor’s office to tell us why they refused to let us publish the teacher article. After addressing their concerns to the extent possible without making partisan additions or deletions, we will look to publish the article within the next few months. If we can’t do that, this incident will have established a troubling precedent and make the state a distinctly less desirable place for some of us to work. Alaska Economic Trends is either nonpartisan or it isn’t.”
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Twitter.
