Senators heard little evidence and even less public support for Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s proposed $180 million teacher bonus study at a Wednesday hearing.
The governor has demanded legislators approve the program — which proposes paying teachers between $5,000 and $15,000 per year for three years — before he lets a broadly popular education bill passed last month become law. Legislators, however, have questioned whether it’s an effective use of the state’s limited dollars.
If they were looking for something concrete to justify the spending, they didn’t get it from Department of Education Commissioner Deena Bishop, who stressed it’s just a study intended to research the impacts of bonuses on recruitment and retention.
“It is a study,” she said. “The feedback and empirical evidence on bonuses are split. I wouldn’t say it supports it one way or another … It is only a three-year pilot, and the funding is requested to span those three years so that we can take a look. Did we make any impact?”
She suggested that once the study has been completed (which would be after Dunleavy reaches his term limit), they could look more carefully at some kind of permanent change for teachers. But on Wednesday, Bishop was unable to answer questions about what that study would look like, who would study it and how much that research would cost.
Bishop also reiterated a talking point that she’s adopted since joining the Dunleavy administration: that a baseline increase to public school funding in the form of a larger base student allocation isn’t an effective way to ensure money ends up in the classroom. Bishop had once advocated for a BSA increase while she was superintendent of the Anchorage and Mat-Su school districts.
At the hearing on Wednesday, Senate President Gary Stevens noted the $174 million increase through the larger BSA contained in the Legislature’s education bill is about the limit of what the state can afford. He noted that any new teacher bonus program would likely come out of the BSA increase.
“Is the BSA the wrong way to increase teacher salaries?” he asked.
Bishop gave a lengthy and meandering answer before conceding, “Certainly, I wouldn’t be able to answer that right now.”
Bishop’s claims that the BSA doesn’t flow through to teachers weren’t received well by the committee, which includes Nikiski teacher Sen. Jesse Bjorkman. Bjorkman pointed out that the labor agreements already account for BSA increases, ensuring that they’ll reach the classroom.
“When I see comments from people who should know better that money in the BSA doesn’t go to teachers, I wonder about those comments,” he said.
Another claim that schools didn’t spend enough of the one-time federal pandemic money on teachers was also not well-received. Several legislators noted that the federal guidance explicitly warned them against using the money for recurring costs like teacher salaries.
As for the research, the committee also heard from Dr. Dayna Jean DeFeo, the director of ISER’s Center for Alaska Education Policy Research. She’s done research on teacher compensation in Alaska and explained that researching bonuses is complicated, in large part because it’s hard to tease out how many people would have taken the job otherwise.
“It’s complicated,” she said, noting that one attempt to run a statewide teacher bonus program in Massachusettes was scrapped after a couple of years.
She noted that the research clearly shows that teacher compensation isn’t competitive nationally. While Alaska teachers are paid reasonably well — a point that conservatives frequently reference while opposing education increases — it doesn’t make up for Alaska’s high cost of living.
She said that when you factor in the cost of living in Alaska, Alaska’s teacher wages are about 25% below the national average. While DeFeo stopped short of telling legislators how to rework the program, she stressed that compensation isn’t the only issue driving turnover.
“Salary, benefits — that’s not the only thing driving teacher turnover,” she said. “Working conditions matter, too, and if we can improve working conditions, teachers will stay longer, even if we hold salaries constant.”.
That was a point echoed in much of the public testimony the committee heard on Wednesday from teachers around the state. Many said that while they supported additional pay, they didn’t believe this would actually solve the problems driving teachers to leave Alaska. One said the governor’s proposed bonuses are being talked about as “moving money” among teachers.
“You could double my pay on the Titanic, and it wouldn’t help a lot,” said Juneau music teacher Michael Bucy, explaining his passion has been sabotaged by cuts that have ballooned his classes with students who would be better suited for courses that are no longer offered. “I don’t want to teach on the Titanic.”
Many teachers pointed out that the program’s annual cost — more than $60 million annually — is more expensive than re-instituting a defined benefit pension plan for public employees, less than $50 million annually. As several pointed out, pensions actually rank higher on the state’s teacher survey than bonuses, in large part because Alaska public employees are only eligible for a 401(k)-style retirement plan and not Social Security.
“I would love a bonus, but I need a pension,” said Natasha Graham, a teacher at Service High School in Anchorage.
Retired teacher Julianna Armstrong also testified against the bill, noting that the quality of her life and retirement is all thanks to the pension guaranteed to her by the state. She said you don’t get that kind of security with bonuses.
“Thanks to that promise Alaska made to me, I have a life, a home, and health insurance … I could not have this life if I had been offered lump sum payments,” she said. “Giving out occasional bribes is treating educators like naive children. ‘Look down all that money in your hand; don’t look in the distance at your empty future.’ The lump sum payment is a lump of coal. You can’t grow old depending on it.”
The committee is set to hear additional testimony on the measure on Monday. The deadline for the governor to veto the Legislature’s education bill or let it go into law is later next week.
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.