AKLEG Day 101: "Sense of the House"

The lawsuit and its fallout have exposed Alaska’s two-tiered public education system, which many Republicans seem deadset on maintaining.

Good morning, Alaska! I’m back from being laid up with some health stuff.

In this edition: While the Alaska Senate has pledged to advance a quick and straightforward fix to Alaska’s public home school system, Republicans in the House made clear that they have no intention of fixing it anytime soon. Instead, they passed a resolution calling for the courts to allow the unconstitutional flow of public money to private and religious schools to continue into 2025, insisting that they are entirely incapable of coming up with a fix before then. In this edition, let’s break down how the ruling and its fallout have laid bare the two-tier education system in Alaska.

Current mood: 🤕

Also: It’s GavelClassic o’clock! Get your guesses in on when the session will end!

Sense of the House

In a spectacular waste of time, the Alaska House approved a “Sense of the House” on Wednesday that outlined the chamber’s support for allowing unconstitutional home school spending to continue through 2025. Republicans insisted that they are so entirely incapable of coming up with a legislative solution in either the remaining three weeks of the legislative session or in a special session this summer that the only sensible solution would be to kick the can 14 months down the road—seemingly forgetting the fact they bull-rushed their omnibus school bill through in three weeks.

The non-binding resolution asks the Legislature to intervene in the lawsuit that found large swaths of the state’s home school program unconstitutional because it was allowing money to public money to benefit private and religious schools, which is explicitly barred by the constitution. It’s unclear if it will have any such effect, given that’s not really how “Sense of the House” resolutions work.

And as if to highlight just how feckless the whole exercise was, House Republicans could only muster 20 votes for their cause, with the measure passing 20-18.

There’s a lot I could say about the three-hour debate over the measure—such as the hypocrisy of the House weighing in on an ongoing lawsuit when Republicans used an ongoing lawsuit as justification to pull the plug on a hearing about prison deaths—but I think that Wednesday’s debate clarified much of the larger battle over school funding and education policy that’s worth unpacking here.

The lawsuit and its fallout have exposed, in many ways, Alaska’s two-tiered public education system. While a majority of students are in traditional neighborhood schools that are increasingly starved of resources, families with the means to afford all or part of their private and religious school tuition have been quietly collecting public money under the guise of home-schooling to pay for extra opportunities that most can only dream of. And Republicans, many of whom are in that latter group, are deadset on maintaining that system as long as possible.

The refusal to accept a straightforward solution to remedy the constitutional issues with the home school allotments is an interesting gambit because the more we’ve learned about how those allotments are used, the more problematic they seem.

Not only has the program allowed parents to directly subsidize their tuition at private and religious schools, but it’s also become a perk for families that can already afford to send their kids to private schools by covering the cost of the sort of extracurriculars that were long ago cut from neighborhood schools. That includes House Education co-chair Rep. Justin Ruffridge, who told the Anchorage Daily News that his kids attend a private school but are also enrolled in the correspondence program in order to receive public education dollars to cover music and dance lessons. Between private school tuition and public home school allotments, kids like his get $10,000 or more spent on their education. In contrast, neighborhood school kids get $5,960 through the base student allocation (an admittedly incomplete look at total per-student spending).

On Wednesday, Ruffridge was joined by GOP Reps. Stapp, Tomaszewski, Vance and Carpenter in announcing on the House floor that they receive allotments. It wasn’t clear how many are actually home-schooling their kids or are like Ruffridge and are using it to pay for extracurriculars on top of their private school education.

Similar stories have come out that paint a picture of a program that has gone well beyond its goal of allowing parents to direct their children’s education. While many parents follow the program’s rules and spirit—operating what most would think of as home school teaching—reports about families worrying about what will happen to their horseback-riding lessons don’t exactly inspire confidence about the program’s equity and fairness at a time when neighborhood schools have cut so much.

The Sense of the House also made sweeping claims that home schools are actually far superior to neighborhood schools when it comes to academics, a point that several legislators said was an unfair and inaccurate comparison when fewer than one in five home school kids participate in standardized testing.

“We really don’t know how they’re doing,” said Sitka independent Rep. Rebecca Himschoot, whose many efforts to increase oversight on home school programs have been staunchly opposed by Rep. Ruffridge and other Republicans.

Much of this explains why the House Republicans aren’t rushing to put the proper constitutional guardrails onto the program. For them, it’s working largely as intended: A program that allows public school dollars to flow to higher-income families to spend with next to no oversight or regard to academic outcomes. It’s why they’re not rushing to the quick fix that supporters of the lawsuit and some in the Senate have suggested, which would be to explicitly prohibit the spending of allotments on private and religious schools.

It also might be worthwhile to discuss whether we should ensure that kids in home-school programs are, you know, actually home-school students.

Given the only measure House Republicans are pushing ahead with is a constitutional amendment to scrap the Alaska Constitution’s prohibition on private and religious school spending, it doesn’t look like they’ll be willing to give up any ground. Instead, all home school students and “home school students” will be left in limbo as the GOP tries its luck in finally knocking down the constitutional barrier that has stopped Republicans from implementing a direct voucher program that would formally enshrine this two-tier education system in Alaska.

And frankly, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not necessarily that these families should be forced to give up the state-funded perks but that all students, regardless of their families’ means or ability to navigate the bureaucracy, should have these opportunities. As one person put it on Twitter, wouldn’t it be nice if we had a locally run stable for everyone to take horseback riding lessons?

That’s something that the House Republicans are clearly not interested in, despite their claims and hollow gestures toward a larger education bill—which, by the way, would greatly increase home school allotment funding. It’s also impossible to forget that they are the ones who’ve put the ceiling on the upper end of an increase to baseline education funding—a figure that Rep. Ruffridge came up with to suit his district—that most traditional schools say falls far short of what’s needed and are the ones who’ve worked hand-in-hand with the governor to ensure that what had been a broadly bipartisan education bill didn’t become law. They are the ones standing in the way of much-needed resources reaching the most students while quietly ensuring that their kids aren’t the ones losing out.

A second education bill making it through the process this year was always a long shot, but after Wednesday’s debate on this Sense of the House, it’s clear that House Republicans’ priorities aren’t with all students.

Stay tuned.