Alaska Policy Forum fails again with its magic cure-all for public education

The Alaska Policy Forum has long peddled the claim that the easy cure-all for public education in Alaska is to spend less money on it and redirect the money so it can be spent on private schools, which is banned by the state Constitution.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy has named his former legislative employee, Bethany Marcum, CEO of the forum, to the University of Alaska Board of Regents where she will no doubt take up that cause.

The latest epistle from the forum, written by Sarah Montalbano, a 2022 computer science graduate from Montana State University, features loaded phrases that give the game away:

“Increased spending is being treated as a cure-all for Alaska’s education system” and “Throwing more money at Alaska’s dismal educational outcomes” and “Simply increasing education spending won’t cure Alaska’s lackluster public education system” and “stop handing districts a blank check without accountability.”

No one with any credibility claims that increased spending is a cure-all for Alaska’s education system or that a blank check is the answer.

I want to look today at two paragraphs of her opinion column, published in the Anchorage Daily News and elsewhere, in which she distorts reality to justify the allegation that money is not being spent in the “classroom.”

It’s clear where Alaska’s priorities are. More positions outside of the classroom are being funded than those within the classroom. Teachers comprised more than half of all staff in only seven of Alaska’s 53 school districts in the last academic year. Statewide, there are three teachers for every four staff performing functions other than teaching.

While some of these functions are surely worthwhile, they’re obviously peripheral to ensuring students leave Alaska’s schools with the basic skills needed to succeed. Funding should be prioritized for teachers and students in the classroom.

If you look at the charts Montalbano provided links to in support of her claim that money is not going to students and that instruction is not a priority, you‘ll see the situation is not as straightforward as the forum would have you believe. The forum is playing word games.

Money spent on libraries is part of making the classroom work. Money spent to have instructional aides is part of making the classroom work.

Of the nearly 17,000 school employees statewide in 2019, there were 7,484 teachers, 2,731 instructional aides, 305 guidance counselors, 135 librarians, 1,192 school and library support staff, 703 student support staff and 2,258 other support staff.

To assume, as the Alaska Policy Forum does, that every instruction aide, guidance counselor, librarian and other support staff members—are “obviously peripheral” to the classroom, shows an ignorance of how schools operate.

Nearly 4,000 instructional aides, guidance counselors, librarians, school and library support staff, and student support staff worked in Alaska schools in 2019. According to the Alaska Policy Forum, these employees are on the periphery of education. That claim shows a lack of understanding of how schools work in Alaska.

According to the Alaska Policy Forum, the state spends $1 billion on “support services” and there are “ample opportunities to trim the $1 billion in support services through price competition and rededicating saved funds towards instruction.”

There have been ample missed opportunities over the years for the Alaska Policy Forum to show exactly how that would work.

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