Gov. Mike Dunleavy and his legislative allies want to strip local school boards of a key power in deciding the future of charter schools.

They want to give the state Board of Education, controlled by Dunleavy supporters, the power to approve charter schools in local communities across Alaska.

This is state overreach, an attempt to further politicize education in Alaska.

School districts have been supportive of a wide variety of charter schools and there is no need a system of local control that has worked well.

Dunleavy and the right-wing GOP legislators lining up behind this idea would be the first to object to having the state board approve charter schools if the state board was not led by Dunleavy supporters.

Local school boards, made up of elected representatives, are always in the best position to understand their communities, not the state school board, made up of unelected political appointees chosen by the governor.

I think that Rep. Zack Fields of Anchorage has sized this up accurately, as reported in the Anchorage Daily News: “As constructed, the charter language is effectively a voucher program in which we would have so-called charter schools with nearly no public oversight using public funds for potentially religious material.”

There is one member of the state school board from the Fairbanks area, right-wing activist Barbara Tyndall, a former teacher at North Pole Christian School. She is the Fourth Judicial District representative on the state board. Appointed last summer, she has yet to be confirmed by the Legislature.

Tyndall falsely claimed in 2022 that critical race theory is often taught in Alaska schools. “For far too long, our schools have been used as propaganda machines to indoctrinate our children on CRT; to the exclusion all other viewpoints,” she said.

“It is no wonder Alaska schools are so far behind in teaching the basics, such as reading; to the point where the education community is now asking for additional funds to teach those basics,” she claimed.

The Dunleavy/GOP plan is to have the unelected state board members set the ground rules for starting charter schools that would have to be operated by local school boards.

The best coverage of the attempted Dunleavy power grab is in the Anchorage Daily News.

Rep. Craig Johnson, the legislator who claimed for many years on financial disclosure forms that he did not know how much money his wife earned, plans a hearing Saturday at 10 a.m. on this and other GOP education proposals.

(Year after year, Johnson’s disclosure forms included letters from the different managers/owners of KTUU. Last year, his wife, Nancy, wrote him a “Dear Craig” letter, in which she said she was prohibited from telling him how much money she makes.)

Johnson has posted limited information on the legislative website, failing to inform the public about details of the hearing.

Instead of examining these proposals in the open, Johnson and other House Republicans are attaching it to an unrelated Senate bill with the goal of getting it to a conference committee with the Senate, bypassing the public process. Senate Bill 140 is about internet service for schools.

Here is the summary of the proposed changes from Johnson’s committee.

Here is a legal summary about legal problems with Johnson’s proposal and details that have not been thought through.

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