Originally published on akmemo.com.
The first month and a half of Alaska’s legislative session has painted a grim and frustrating picture surrounding public education. A newly elected set of bipartisan majorities is looking to break through nearly a decade of status-quo indecision that’s starved Alaska’s public schools to deliver a massive boost to education funding. Still, that effort faces two significant challenges: Alaska’s ongoing financial woes and Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s stubborn efforts to leverage much-needed funding for a slate of less-than-popular policy changes.
Dunleavy and his allies have screeched against any effort to increase the state’s per-student funding formula, arguing that they need to see accountability and reforms before they throw schools a much-needed lifeline. We heard many Dunleavy Republicans make that case two weeks ago when the education bill, HB69, cleared two committee assignments, and will likely hear more of it on the House floor before the vote.
As legislators have unpacked Dunleavy’s way, it’s become apparent that it continues the state’s path toward a two-tier education system. As a renewed lawsuit challenging the seemingly unconstitutional exploitation of the state’s homeschool allotments shows, the public education system under six years of Dunleavy delivers vastly inequitable student opportunities.
I think it’s critical that we understand where the governor’s policies are leading us before we get mired in hollow talk about test scores and flawed studies.
Behind all the rhetoric that neighborhood schools must do more with less, what Dunleavy proposes is a system that funnels what little funding he will support to the few — while leaving everyone else to fight over the scraps.
Let’s take a deep dive.
We didn’t get here by mistake
Last March, the legislature overwhelmingly passed Senate Bill 140, a historic education measure, with just three no votes. Even though it was the most significant single increase in funding in state history, it still fell well short of what many districts needed. Cuts and shuttered schools were still expected, but fewer than the alternative. Many remained cautiously optimistic that the bill would at least help stop the bleeding — the bleak drumbeat of shuttered schools — and give teachers room to breathe.
But not Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who vetoed the bill.
Even before his veto, the governor began twisting arms among legislative allies to prevent a veto override (which needed 40 votes out of the initial 56 yes votes) with rumors of improper political pressure and promises. The override failed by a single vote. Some who had previously voted for the legislation switched their vote, insisting it was the plan all along.
Dunleavy was never subtle about his intention to spike the bill. In fact, the real drama centered not on whether he’d veto the measure, but whether he could stop the override. It was one of the most high-tension votes in recent political history, and helped mobilize a shift that elected bipartisan coalitions to both houses in a year when Trump won nearly 55% of the vote.
With the veto sustained, lawmakers scrambled to put together last-minute temporary legislation so schools around the state could limp along for another year.
It’s a situation that has left districts throughout the state in a fog of uncertainty and ever-rising costs while flat funding and inflation — that pesky thief in the night — are eating a generation’s future for lunch.
The situation — a starvation diet for most
This year, the expiration of last year’s one-time stop-gap education funding looms large alongside Dunleavy’s radical demands that are doggedly rolling back into the mix. Meanwhile, financially hamstrung school districts face even more school closures, escalating teacher shortages, ballooning class sizes, and the wholesale slashing of entire school programs statewide.
“We have trimmed the fat. We have cut into the flesh, and we are beginning to cut the very bones of the district,” Fairbanks school board member Bobby Burgess told a joint education committee hearing during the Association of Alaska School Boards’ fly-in in February.
The pain has far-reaching implications to the state’s desirability and workforce readiness, all factors that undercut the economy. Study after study has also shown that increased educational investments lead to lower crime rates later in life.
The Legislature’s education committees have been inundated with heartbreaking stories from students in stretched-thin neighborhood schools.
But even in the dark spots, Alaska’s neighborhood schools are still delivering for students as best as they can, given everything. Among much of the doom-and-gloom testimony, there are many bright spots and stories of students whose lives are better because of the care and attention they find at their neighborhood schools.
“People will forget what you said and people will forget what you do, but people will never forget how you made them feel,” said Reese Taylor, a student in the Annette Island School District, at the school board fly-in. “Personally, I like to say how my school district made me feel from the first day as a student in a new school. I feel accepted, loved and welcome to be myself. I believe that’s a direct result of teachers who were made to feel safe, important, supported and empowered to give the best of themselves in order to create that same environment for their students.”
At the news conference rolling out his education bill, Dunleavy insisted that the alarm over closing schools was overblown.
“You just don’t need as many schools,” he said, pointing to declining population numbers.
But his insistence that the crisis just can’t be helped flies in the face of head-turning increases to other parts of the budget under the Dunleavy administration. Budget hearings earlier this year showed that $280 million of the $317 million in growth over the past 10 years has gone to prisons and troopers.
Meanwhile, school funding fell by $62 million over that period, or about 5%. When factoring in inflation, it’s a loss of nearly $420 million in buying power.
Rep. Rebecca Himschoot, I-Sitka, emphasized similar points with her HB69, which would immediately boost K-12 funding by more than $360 million annually. The bill would also increase funding for the following two years, and thereafter link the BSA to inflation.
And don’t let Dunleavy Republicans fool you. While Alaska spends a lot of dollars per student compared to the rest of the country, that comparison neglects crucial context, as was explained by Dayna Jean DeFeo, director of ISER’s Center for Alaska Education Research, at a hearing last week.
According to her breakdown, Alaska’s raw dollars may paint a good picture of the state funding schools at 29% above the national average. However, when you factor in the cost of living in Alaska and communities beyond Anchorage, it drops to 15% below the national average. The same goes for teacher compensation, where nominal dollars put Alaska ahead of the nation, but when adjusted for costs, drops to about 25% below the average.
Not-so-‘honest’ conversations
Meanwhile, Dunleavy continues to pretend public education’s problem isn’t about money-starved schools but about poor student performance and nefarious “special interests” (code word for teachers), which he insists cannot be fixed with more funding. Instead, Dunleavy remains stubbornly committed to far-right catchphrases like “accountability” and “school choice,” policies that he’s used to justify outsized attention on a fraction of students participating in homeschool programs and charters. There, he insists, is where improved outcomes will come from.
“If these scores don’t motivate the discussion about policy, I don’t know what will, to be honest with you,” Dunleavy said at a recent news conference while pointing at a chart of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores.
But Dunleavy’s proposed policies, by design, will not help all students.
Far from it.
The governor has proposed only about a third of the education funding as the leading proposal in the state House, and none of it would flow through the base student allocation. His proposals — which the Democratic, independent and moderate Republican legislators who make up the Legislature’s two coalition majorities have already soundly rejected — would direct money toward boosting funding for homeschool students and throw the doors wide open on public charters, granting a state board appointed entirely by him the power to foist new charter programs on unsuspecting school districts.
For example, a whopping 40% of the governor’s proposed increase to education funding — $75 million — would flow directly to state homeschool programs that serve just 17% of all Alaska students.
As the lawsuit challenging homeschool allocation spending lays out, Dunleavy’s relaxed oversight on allocation funding has meant that a not insignificant number of homeschool students are receiving public funds to attend private or religious schools. Some homeschool programs allow families to use public funds to pay private-school tuition, while others have permitted private-school students to enroll in homeschool programs using public money to pay for extracurriculars.
So, while neighborhood school students face increasingly cramped classrooms, the state has allowed some Alaskans to bankroll their children’s extracurricular activities, including horseback riding and dance lessons, with public education dollars.
To be clear, the Alaska Constitution clearly states that this type of activity, funnelling public funds into private and religious schools, is prohibited. The general public is also not on his side, either. Alaska voters resoundingly defeated Dunleavy’s constitutional convention push in 2022, while voters in several other states have rejected or reversed similar practices because they favor the well-off over the many with little accountability or results.
And one of the most glaring holes in the governor’s demands is that for all the accountability Dunleavy demands from neighborhood schools, homeschool and charter school students opt out of testing at a far higher rate. Only about 14% of homeschool students participate in testing, leaving us with little certainty on how they are actually doing, and invites other “school choice” advocates to cherrypick datapoints to support their positions. Graduation rates are similarly poor compared to traditional schools.
Taken in total, all the governor’s talk about investing in “proven” results essentially translates into investing into programs that serve just a segment of students — students, who, as I’ll lay out in the next installment of this deep dive, also are typically more wealthy and less diverse than those in neighborhood schools — while everyone else is condemned to operate on a starvation diet. This is a movement reflected in right-wing talks about “parental involvement,” “school choice” and culture war hysteria that allow and encourage wealthier, whiter families to abandon neighborhood schools.
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 Bluesky.
