In a bit of fortuitous timing, the Senate Education Committee held a hearing on the governor’s education bill, Senate Bill 82, on Monday that went a long way toward illustrating just how unserious and poorly justified the policies are.
Legislators zeroed in on the $75 million the governor wants to add toward homeschool funding, with many thoughtful concerns about accountability given the fact that more than 80% of homeschool students opt out of testing. Committee Chair Sen. Löki Tobin brought up a good point about how the Alaska Constitution requires the state to provide a quality education to all students, and we can’t really say we’re meeting that constitutional duty when just a fraction of students are testing.
Education Commissioner Deena “AI Did My Homework” Bishop gave characteristically vague and specific-free answers. She said she heard from some programs that they knew the testing results would be higher if everyone just tested. Low graduation rates, she claimed, are because some districts are pushing kids with chronic absenteeism and other learning challenges into homeschool programs. She couldn’t even justify the need for funding — the testimony of two homeschool programs said they already break even, or better. They’re not facing the same funding crisis as everyone else.
“We just want to ensure that our children are valued in our public education system,” she finally said about why Dunleavy wants to put 40% of his proposed additional funding into homeschool programs that serve about 17% of Alaska’s students.
So, vibes.
While all the talk of anecdotal success stories and parental involvement may be good for those who can take advantage of it, it was hard to overlook the kind of educational system everyone without engaged parents and the means to take advantage of these programs is left with. Bishop continued to defend the lack of funding for an increase to per-student funding through the base student allocation, arguing that targeted investments are more appropriate — even if they are already doubling down on a system that, by most accounts, isn’t facing a funding crisis.
Sen. Tobin was blunt in her assessment of Bishop and Dunleavy’s positions.
“$75M to correspondence programs but none to our schools like Sleetmute, which is currently condemned and students are learning in a condemned environment,” Tobin said. “Good to hear.”
As the hearing laid out, the governor’s legislation would leave most students out in the cold in educational environments that are both figuratively — and literally — condemned. Let’s continue to break down the flaws in his claims, particularly around charter schools, and how legislators are holding the line for equity in education.
More nuanced understanding of why charters do ‘well’
A fascinating study by Fairbanks educator Beth Zirbes and Mike Bronson, a Ph.D. who volunteers for the Anchorage NAACP, adds much-needed context to the governor’s repeated refusal to abandon his specious Harvard study that he and supporters insist proves Alaska’s charter schools are the best in the country (mainly ignoring the fact that it’s the current system that played into those results and many states that are lagging well below Alaska are essentially the wild west of unregulated charters).
Zirbes and Bronson also note that the Harvard study’s author, Paul Peterson, is a long-time proponent of school vouchers and wasn’t particularly forthcoming about the study’s inner workings, such as which charters he pulled for comparison. Zirbes and Bronson also point out that the Peterson study compares Alaska’s charter system to other states, not to peer neighborhood schools.
And it certainly doesn’t consider students’ socioeconomic status.
Doing their own work, Zirbes and Bronson’s study reveals that charter schools are not nearly as rosy an indicator of educational success as Peterson’s study purportedly found, nor as exaggerated and misleading as Dunleavy’s claims.
Instead, students who perform better in charters do well academically largely because they come from wealthier, better educated, whiter families than the general population. They found that socioeconomic status — measured by the number of students on free and reduced lunch — is a far more accurate predictor of student outcomes.
“In short, the answer is no, charter school students likely do not perform better than neighborhood schools, after accounting for characteristics of students,” write the co-authors, noting a fairly linear connection between academic performance and the overall family wealth of the student body.
According to Zirbes and Bronson, factors like chronic absenteeism, language barriers and special-education needs also play a role. Charters can typically filter out those issues, while neighborhood schools cannot.
“While these latter variables are statistically significant, school type never is,” the co-authors assert.
“We discovered that charter schools, on average, have very different student bodies than neighborhood schools. For example, charter schools have far fewer economically disadvantaged students and English language learners,” explain Zirbes and Bronson. “Furthermore, not only do charter school students in Alaska differ from neighborhood school students in Alaska, Alaska charter students are also whiter and richer than other charter students in the Lower 48 states … Alaska charter school student bodies look like private schools in the Lower 48 states more than they resemble charter school students in the Lower 48.”
The path ahead — a rising tide lifts all boats
Luckily, not everyone sees the world of public education like Dunleavy and Bishop do.
As Anchorage Rep. Alyse Galvin pointed out in a budget subcommittee hearing, targeted funding may provide opportunities to roughly 23% of charter and homeschool students, but what about the other 76% of Alaska’s students in neighborhood schools?
“There has been so much talk about all of the things that we get to offer in our specialty schools, whether it’s charter, whether it’s homeschool, whether it’s wherever else … but in our neighborhood schools, which is serving more than 70% of our students, it seems to me that we need more opportunities like what’s offered (to the 23%),” she said. “I like to think that we provide our opportunities to all students.”
She said everything from job-readiness programs and coding classes to extracurricular activities is essential for today’s young people, but not everyone has the same ability to homeschool students or attend public charter programs. While public charters cannot charge students tuition, they aren’t required to provide basic services like transportation or meals and also can require a not-insignificant amount of parent volunteer time.
Volunteer time requirements “are not possible in these neighborhood schools that are serving 70% of our families. Those families are very, very busy,” Galvin said. “In my mind, we’ll have to shrink up the classes, we’ll have to have teachers with more capacity to engage with families. … I just want to be sure we’re thinking about how can we invest in a way that will bring those opportunities to these families that I believe have a wish for (them), too.”
Senate Majority Leader Cathy Giessel, R-Anchorage, recently relayed sentiments from a second-grade student’s letter to her office during a Senate floor speech. The little girl described trying to learn in ever-larger class sizes, with her growing class not having enough room on the rug for storytime.
Giessel said it’s unthinkable for Alaskans anywhere to be OK with that.
“It brought tears to my eyes to read that Holly wrote that there’s not enough room for some of the kids on the rug,” Giessel said. “Holly and I are thinking about those kids for whom there is no room. What does it feel like to be a kid in a classroom, trying your best to learn, and there’s no room for you? No one should be left out because there’s no room for them on the rug or at the teacher’s desk.”
As Alaska lawmakers negotiate with the governor on education funding, Giessel recalled an old saying she believes should guide the legislature’s work.
“Our children are the living messages that we send to a future that we will never see,” she said. “What is the message that we are sending to the future through the children today who are in our classrooms?”
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.
