By: James Brooks, Alaska Beacon
The Alaska Legislature opened an 18-month study of the state’s troubled public education system on Tuesday as lawmakers convened the first meeting of their Task Force on Education Funding, established by law this spring.
Alaska’s public schools rank among the worst in the country according to national standardized testing data, and members of the bipartisan, bicameral task force have been charged with identifying ways to improve performance by changing the way schools are funded and manage their students.
Legislative leaders have said the task force will also have the opportunity to examine funding for schools and ways to address rising costs of transportation, utilities, insurance and maintenance.
Members of the task force will hold a series of hearings and discussions before drafting recommendations for new laws that legislators might implement. Those recommendations must be delivered before lawmakers arrive at the Alaska Capitol in January 2027.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy called legislators into a special session to address education issues, but lawmakers have ignored that call and are not planning to hold formal meetings before the special session ends at the end of the month. Legislative leaders have said they prefer to work through the task force instead.
Dunleavy is term-limited and will be out of office by the time the task force’s recommendations are complete.
“The current state of Alaska’s education is not where we’d like it to be, but I know that we can get to a better place if we all work together, we find common ground, and we build upon what we agree upon,” said Sen. Löki Tobin, D-Anchorage and co-chair of the task force.
But on Monday, it appeared that finding that common ground could be difficult, as task force participants identified different areas they prefer to focus upon.
“John Muir said that when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. The same is true in education,” said Rep. Rebecca Himschoot, I-Sitka. If we take steps to improve teacher quality, that has an impact on the classroom. If we take steps to make sure kids are fed, that has an impact. If we take steps to make sure that we have the right ratios of teachers with students. All of these things have impacts.”
Rep. Justin Ruffridge, R-Soldotna, said he would like the task force to consider how it measures results. What standardized tests, if any, should be used to consider performance?
“I think accountability broadly is a place that I hope to go, and I hope that the (Alaska Department of Education and Early Development) can have some input on that,” he said.
Sen. Jesse Kiehl, D-Juneau, suggested that the task force should be “looking at how we empower local government” to deal with education decisions, while Sen. Mike Cronk, R-Tok, said he wants to make sure the task force is “focusing on policies like the READS Act,” which was a bipartisan bill intended to improve reading performance among younger students.
“We are seeing success in that, and those are the kind of policies we need,” he said.
This year, lawmakers voted to increase the base student allocation, core of the state’s per-pupil funding formula, but Ruffridge suggested that lawmakers need to examine other aspects of the formula to see whether they are delivering the intended results.
Alaska, for example, multiplies the base student allocation for students with “intensive needs” and those in rural Alaska.
“It’s a scary proposition to open up the foundation formula, but I think it’s something that we are really tasked with doing in this group,” he said, adding that the state has failed to properly maintain school facilities, particularly in rural Alaska.
Cronk, in prior comments, said he also is concerned about school maintenance. In most of Alaska, proper maintenance depends on funding from the state government.
“If we want to continue to have (stable) education funding, us as a collective group need to create a fiscal plan for this state,” he said.
“I’m hoping that if we’re talking about funding, that should be our goal as part of this, to make sure that we can come up with something so we do have a level funding for all the government services,” Cronk said.
A legislative task force in 2021 did draft a long-term state plan to bring expenses and revenue into balance, but lawmakers have not adopted any legislation suggested by that task force.
The next meeting of the education task force is scheduled for Oct. 30 in Juneau.
