The Governor's New Clothes
The Governor's New Clothes
It's almost like the governor is deeply and fundamentally opposed to funding public schools.
Happy Friday, Alaska.
In this edition: This year, we’ve seen growing support for increased school funding from practically everyone except for Gov. Mike Dunleavy and his far-right allies, who are insistent we ignore the testimony of schools, school boards, teachers and parents and that everything is just fine—maybe even overfunded. So, what happens when nonpartisan state economists put together a report that finds Alaska’s teacher pay isn’t quite what it used to be? The Dunleavy administration killed the report and accused the economists of producing work that “deviated from the publication’s standard of neutrality.” Let’s look at the report Dunleavy doesn’t want you to read, what it says and what Dunleavy’s actions say about him and conservatives’ approach to public schools. Also, the reading list and weekend watching.
Current mood: 😲
The Governor’s New Clothes
If you’ve listened to conservatives’ side of the debate on teacher pay and school funding, you’ll know their standard retort to the chorus of calls for adequate funding. Schools are practically swimming in money! Why fund teachers when they are, for some yet-to-be-explained reason, intentionally refusing to educate kids while simultaneously indoctrinating them into treating each other with dignity and respect? Let’s funnel a bunch of public money to private and religious schools instead!
In those conversations, they’ll wave around fact sheets and charts from right-wing think tanks that they demand prove their point, frequently framing deeply inequitable charter school and voucher programs as a panacea to public education. And, as is often the case, the answer is it’s far more complicated than just money.
That’s certainly the takeaway from a state economist’s article analyzing teacher pay in Alaska that was slated to appear in the October edition of state-published Alaska Economic Trends magazine, which regularly offers snapshots and analysis of many sectors of the Alaska economy from government employment to the pot industry.
At least it would have been if not for the thin skin of the Dunleavy administration.
In a move that’s shocking even after nearly five years in office, the Dunleavy administration killed the report just days before it was slated to run. According to an op-ed published by Dan Robinson, the research chief for the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development, and reporting by the Alaska Beacon, it’s a first in many decades for the storied publication and one that throws its future into doubt.
“Nonpolitical state government professionals must be willing to initiate hard conversations when an administration oversteps. Unless we stand up in these situations, the state risks losing things like the objectivity and political neutrality of a 50-plus-year economic publication like Trends,” Robinson wrote in his editorial. “There are ways for an administration to make things difficult on people who don’t simply do what they’re told, even if they can’t be summarily fired the way political appointees can, but — to paraphrase a line from a movie — we can’t be so afraid of losing our jobs or otherwise being punished that we don’t do our jobs.”
Robinson and the Beacon detail how the analysis—which isn’t pointed against the governor but does throw a bit of cold water on the notion that Alaska leads the nation when it comes to teacher pay—was met with a “HARD HOLD” after a preview was sent to Dunleavy’s communications director, Jeff Turner. Efforts to get a response or explanation from the governor’s office went unanswered except for a later statement from Department of Labor Commissioner Cathy Muñoz, accusing the economists of producing work that “deviated from the publication’s standard of neutrality.”
What, exactly, in the article was unfair hasn’t been spelled out.
But thanks to the Alaska Beacon’s James Brooks getting his hands on the report, we can all see what was so very bothersome for the Dunleavy administration.
[Read: The unpublished ‘Teachers' shrinking wage advantage’]
About the report
To summarize, it’s precisely the kind of article you’d find in any edition of Economic Trends, meaning it’s thoughtful, a bit dry and the sort of thing that doesn’t generate a ton of attention beyond us policy wonks. You’d get a few articles summarizing the findings, and perhaps it’d get mentioned in a few legislative hearings.
Its findings are that, yes, Alaska was the best-paying state for teachers in the 80s and 90s, but those days are long since gone as Alaska’s teacher wages stagnated and other states boosted pay. “Teachers’ shrinking wage advantage,” declares the headline, with a subhead explaining, “Alaska used to pay the most, but now we’re tenth.”
With an average annual salary of $73,722, Alaska is still near the top of the wages for teachers, the report found, but that position is sliding. The report shows Alaska’s wage premium over the Lower 48 has nearly vanished over the last two decades, that Alaska’s losing ground to neighboring states in terms of wages, that Alaska’s teacher pay isn’t keeping up with inflation and that younger teachers are earning less than what longer-serving teachers were making at the same point in their career.
It also confirms many anecdotes we’ve heard in the Alaska Legislature about a hollowing out of the teacher workforce because younger teachers aren’t sticking around. That’s resulting in a workforce that has a smaller portion of younger teachers and a more significant portion of teachers who are nearing retirement.
None of it ought to be particularly surprising to people following the debate on school spending in the Legislature, which has been filled with testimony from teachers, districts, school boards and parents about the impact that essentially flat-funding education has on the state’s education system.
The takeaway, though, isn’t to point the finger at Gov. Dunleavy and his veto of $87.4 million in school funding this year but to show that the troubles facing Alaska’s school system are the product of 20 years of the state’s collective failure to keep pace with inflation or attract and retain young workers. It also notes that the problems extend beyond pay to the retirement system, working conditions, the general lack of support for teachers and many other factors.
What it says about Dunleavy
The debate and fight over school funding isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. The Alaska Legislature, with broad bipartisan agreement, approved a $174 million one-time boost to education funding this last session (Dunleavy vetoed half). This next session will likely include an effort to pass a permanent increase to the school funding (though, now, I’d be worried that Dunleavy would veto that, too).
Throughout the debate, however, the Dunleavy administration has insisted that everything is fine for schools and that a funding increase isn’t needed. During the House Finance Committee’s work on school funding, Dunleavy’s administration circulated a deeply misleading chart that purported to show schools swimming in unspent cash reserves (I broke down that report and why it was so misleading).
That the governor would find this report distressing is profoundly telling.
While the governor frequently falls back to his past as a school administrator—one that gave him a much better retirement than today’s teachers get—to shield himself from criticism, he has never been much of an ally. Recall, for example, that his year-one budget called for a roughly 25% cut to K-12 funding or that one of his few legislative proposals from his time as senator was a constitutional amendment to create a voucher program. A program, it should be noted, he refused to explain.
His latest education proposal was essentially just a copy of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” Bill that would ban teachers from talking about sex or gender identity under the guise of “parental rights.” The latest version of that legislation would require parents to sign off on every lesson students would receive.
It’s critically important to view these actions as part of the broader conservative playbook on education. Simply put, it’s one that is designed to undermine schools—whether it be through fights over “woke” issues, institutional efforts to cut off funding, or both—to build support for policy changes that open the door to public dollars going to private and religious schools. Break the system so you can fix it.
The Washington Post laid out the issue with some clarity earlier this year, documenting a conference call between home-schooling pioneer Michael Farris and a shadowy group of millionaires:
Now, speaking on a confidential conference call to a secretive group of Christian millionaires seeking, in the words of one member, to “take down the education system as we know it today,” Farris made the same points he had made in courtrooms since the 1980s. Public schools were indoctrinating children with a secular worldview that amounted to a godless religion, he said.
The solution: lawsuits alleging that schools’ teachings about gender identity and race are unconstitutional, leading to a Supreme Court decision that would mandate the right of parents to claim billions of tax dollars for private education or home schooling.
For Dunleavy and his agenda, it’s critically important that the debate stays simple and enraging: Schools get too much money for how bad they are. Nevermind that the claimed low performance of Alaska’s educational system is far from uniform, that inflation has eaten away at the buying power of school budgets, that the state’s retirement system actively discourages young people from sticking around and developing into invaluable teachers, or that the voucher systems they claim work so well only work because they allow schools to be selective with who they admit.
The problems laid out in the Alaska Economic Trends report pierce the fiction that is so important to Dunleavy that he’s willing to censor the information. Thanks to Robinson and others who didn’t sit idly by and let the administration get away with it.
In his op-ed, Robinson pledged to continue to fight to publish the article but conceded that “If we can’t do that, this incident will have established a troubling precedent and make the state a distinctly less desirable place for some of us to work.”
Stay tuned.
Reading list
Group sues state to stop mining company from trucking ore on Interior public roads
State’s draft energy plan highlights familiar Alaska megaprojects, offers vague plans for renewables
Anchorage educators aiming high as Alaska schools begin legislated literacy efforts
Anchorage’s annual Día de Muertos celebration gives space to honor loved ones through art
Weekend watching
As someone who grew up on “Arthur” and later spent a bunch of time in Nebraska listening to what I’d only recently discovered is aptly named “Midwest emo” music, this mashup is the best thing I’ve experienced in a while.
Have a great weekend, y’all.