The teacher pay report the Dunleavy administration killed just before it was set to be published in the October edition of the state’s economics magazine has been published in the December edition, just with a new title and a message promoting the governor’s legislation.
The report, an original copy of which was obtained and released in October by the Alaska Beacon, details how Alaska used to be the highest-paying state for teachers in the 1980s and 1990s but slid over several decades to 10th among states. While the report stressed that the trend had been in the works well before Dunleavy took office, his administration — which this year vetoed tens of millions of dollars in school funding — killed the report.
The secretive decision to censor the report sparked outrage. Dan Robinson, the chief of the research and analysis section that publishes Alaska Economic Trends, penned an editorial in the Anchorage Daily News that challenged the decision as an unprecedented politicization of the publication.
“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,” he wrote. “Alaska Economic Trends is either nonpartisan or it isn’t.”
Former labor commissioners Heidi Drygas, Ed Flanagan, Jim Sampson, and Click Bishop (now a state senator) also blasted the decision in a joint editorial, calling the decision “heavy-handed” and encouraging people to read the report for themselves.
“See if you find anything controversial, unfair or biased in it,” they wrote. “We sure don’t.”
While economists struggled to get firm answers on the decision to censor the article, acting Department of Labor Commissioner Cathy Muñoz later accused the economists of producing a report that “deviated from the publication’s standard of neutrality.”
Exactly what deviated has never been explained publicly, but comparing the two versions of the article — the one obtained by the Alaska Beacon and the one ultimately published —reveals only a few changes, with a vast majority of the original piece intact.
The most noticeable change is a new, toothless title.
It goes from “Teachers’ shrinking wage advantage” with the subhead“ Alaska used to pay the most, but now we’re tenth” to “How teachers’ wages compare” with the subhead “Alaska was 10th in 2022, down from the ‘80s and ‘80s.”
The only change to the text of the article is the addition of a paragraph explaining that enrollment has declined as the state’s school-age population has also declined.
Perhaps the most substantial change can be found in Muñoz’s “From the Commissioner” message. Among the year-end round-up, Muñoz dedicated an entire paragraph to promoting Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s House Bill 106, a bill that would pay teachers up to $15,000 a year to not leave the profession. The legislation has found little traction in the Legislature, which instead opted to increase overall school funding with the thinking that decisions on how to use the money are best left to local districts.
“While teachers’ salaries are set at the local level, Governor Dunleavy introduced House Bill 106 last session to address teacher retention and recruitment,” Muñoz wrote. “If approved by the Legislature, school districts will be able to address this top-priority recommendation from the Governor’s Task Force on Teacher Retention and Recruitment.”
No analysis of this legislation is included in the magazine.
Why it matters
School funding has been a touchy subject for Dunleavy. Despite growing bipartisan recognition that the state’s status quo funding of school districts has failed to keep up with inflation over recent years, the governor has pushed back against the notion. When the House Finance Committee was in the midst of considering increasing funding, the administration released misleading documents that showed a rosier-than-reality picture of local districts’ financial situation, giving some conservative legislators fodder to accuse districts of being dishonest and to oppose the proposal.
The Legislature voted bipartisanly to increase school funding by about $174 million this year, but the governor vetoed it by half.
What’s important to keep in mind is that a permanent increase in school funding is far closer to becoming a reality than Dunleavy’s largely unserious teacher retention legislation. In the waning days of this year’s legislative session, legislators added language to a school broadband bill to make the $174 million increase in school funding permanent.
Had the normal legislative process been allowed to play out, it would have likely reached the House floor for a vote, but instead, the Dunleavy-aligned Republican House leadership intervened in the hearing and delayed it just enough to miss the session deadline.
Unless things have significantly changed in the interim, that legislation could be taken up early in the session once legislators return to Juneau in January.
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.
