This commentary was originally published on akmemo.com.
It’s been 15 working days since the Alaska Legislature passed Senate Bill 140 on a 57-3 vote, approving the largest single increase to baseline public school funding in state history as part of a sweeping compromise that included everyone except Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy. It’s been 14 days since Dunleavy delivered a rambling, grievance-filled news conference where he bitterly complained that the Legislature was repeating the error of just shoveling money into schools and that he would veto it all unless legislators delivered a second education bill packed with his priorities — which he insisted will actually make a difference. What would actually be funded between the real bill and the hypothetical one would have to be a conversation, Dunleavy said, a less-than-overt hint that the funding for the hypothetical bill would come from the $174 million annual increase to the base student allocation, which determines baseline school funding.
Legislators described the threat as “disheartening” after the bruising fight to reach a deal on Senate Bill 140, a process that was hampered by the notoriously mercurial negotiation style of a frequently absent governor. On the one hand, legislators never had a clear idea of the governor’s demands and what latitude there was in crafting a deal. On the other hand, what legislators did know, they didn’t like. There’s a reason his $180 million study on teacher bonuses and charter school changes — which have still never been outlined in a bill by the administration — weren’t in the bill.
And in the 14 working days since the governor delivered his demands, his hypothetical legislation never materialized.
On Wednesday, no one in the Legislature knew what the governor planned to do. Would he make good on his threat? Would he relent and let Senate Bill 140 become law, keeping the budget as leverage over the remaining session?
“We don’t know what the governor is going to do,” Senate President Gary Stevens, R-Kodiak, said during Wednesday’s Senate Majority news conference, noting that he has already been in talks with House Speaker Cathy Tilton about the next steps. “He has not told us. He has not told House leadership. At this point, we’re thinking that if the governor does veto it, we’ll try to meet on Monday to deal with an override. How that turns out, too, I’m not sure.”
The Legislature didn’t exactly move heaven and earth to meet the governor’s demands. Because of Republican infighting on the education committee (with the notorious Rep. Jamie Allard now apparently without staff), the governor’s ideas only got a less-than-obsequious set of hearings that, as Education Committee chair Sen. Löki Tobin diplomatically described at Wednesday’s Senate Majority news conference “really illuminated some additional work that might need to be done to vet those policies.”
She was being charitable.
For all the insistence that bonuses are superior to a stable and certain increase in school funding, Department of Education Commissioner Deena Bishop — a former school administrator, though you wouldn’t know it since she joined the Dunleavy administration — conceded there’s no hard evidence to support the claim $60 million in annual teacher bonuses will actually make a difference to the state’s revolving door of teachers. It’d be an excellent opportunity to study bonuses, many agree, if not for the fact that Alaska schools can’t exactly wait three years for a study to play out or that all the existing research points show that if you really want to keep teachers around you need to meaningfully improve the working conditions. Pay and bonuses are just part of the equation that contributes to the teacher exodus. Testimony has highlighted that the problems with the teaching profession run much deeper with ballooning class sizes and an ever-growing set of responsibilities for an ever-shrinking set of hands. Simply put, it’s intensely stressful to be a teacher in Alaska right now at any wage.
Keeping teachers around is one of the best ways to improve student outcomes because teachers who stick around make for better teachers, which makes for young adults who are just a little better prepared for all the ups and downs of life.
Getting teachers to stick around will require many changes to the state’s public school system will require a multitude of responses, whether that’s a pension or better pay or bonuses — which are actually already offered by several districts — or smaller class sizes, more staff, aides, janitors and reading tutors. The thinking has long been that local districts and school boards are best suited to make those decisions with meaningful accountability to their communities — rather than a vengeful governor elected on a promise of easy answers.
The governor and Commissioner Bishop don’t exactly hold local control in high esteem. That’s highlighted by the frequent potshots at local districts, suggesting that the financial woes are not due to six years of essentially flat state funding but are simply self-inflicted accounting problems. That Commissioner Bishop was in the driver’s seat of those decisions for many years seems to go unmentioned.
This attitude extends to the governor’s proposed charter school “expansion,” which is little more than a power grab that would take decision-making on charter schools away from local communities and put it in the hands of the state Board of Education. A board that happens to be wholly appointed by the governor and has happily served as an extension of his administration. Senate negotiators said the charter school changes appear to be the key sticking point with the administration. As much as the governor demands that legislators hand him over the keys, senators said it is simply a “non-starter” to freeze out local communities.
Still, Dunleavy is right in one thing.
Schools do have an accounting problem. Their baseline funding has been essentially unchanged for six years, while everything else is much more expensive. Things haven’t completely fallen apart because, yes, districts have received influxes of one-time money that helped paper over the state’s anemic funding levels. Districts have been good about squeezing blood from rocks as they make cuts and squeeze what they can from what has been given to them.
However, the idea that Department of Education Commissioner Bishop seems to fall back on — that everything will be OK — neglects to recognize the dire neglect facing many of our schools. At the news of a slightly better revenue forecast for the upcoming year — about $150 million in additional general fund money — Fairbanks Sen. Click Bishop (no relation) said he hopes to direct that money as a lifeline to schools in the form of major maintenance funding, saying that it’s embarrassing to see operating classrooms in dilapidated schools riddled with black mold. Outside the easy answers offered by the Dunleavy administration, Alaska schools are in crisis.
There is an accounting problem.
There’s not enough money for public schools.
But whether there’s the political will to change that is another story.
Stay tuned.
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.