AKLEG Day 39: 'They're not props. They're human beings.'

While some legislators say it's not on students to prove funding their education is worth it, others say it's just the first step to address inequities in Alaska.

Feb 24, 2024

Happy Friday, Alaska. It’s been quite the week.

In this edition: The House did it. After a raucous week of brinksmanship, closed-door meetings and narrow votes, legislators inked a deal on education that includes an increase to baseline education funding in Alaska, additional funding to implement the Alaska Reads Act and compromises on several conservative policy proposals. The Senate looks like it’ll pass the bill early next week, and Gov. Mike Dunleavy is an unknown. In this edition, let’s highlight some closing arguments on the legislation that illustrate the deep divides in Alaska’s approach to public education. Also, some very Alaska weekend watching.

Current mood: 😴

“Tonight really is a historic night,” said Rep. Bryce Edgmon, I-Dillingham, as the House neared a final vote on Senate Bill 140, legislation that started as a one-paragraph bill to improve internet speeds in remote schools and morphed into an omnibus education bill, Thursday night. “We have flipped the script on a major omnibus bill by doing it early in the session and not at the very end under the pressure of adjournment. I want to thank a number of first-term legislators for leading the way. They brought us together on issues that were so disparate and so polarizing that just 24 hours ago, I was doubtful that we would have gotten to where we are tonight.”

Even that probably understated the uncertainty surrounding the Legislature’s efforts to pass a permanent increase to public school funding this year. The legislation faced an uphill battle after a series of failed procedural votes earlier this week saw the House fail to take up versions of the bill drafted by the House Rules Committee and the House Finance Committee. House Republicans warned that if their omnibus devised in the House Rules Committee — a far-reaching package of conservative priorities that received only a single hearing — didn’t advance, then education funding would be in peril. On Wednesday, that looked to be the case after Republicans blocked a series of amendments that would have raised the base student allocation between $680 to nearly $1,900.

But between growing public pressure and closed-door negotiations, legislators ultimately reached a compromise deal that will increase the BSA by $680, making permanent the one-time boost to education legislators approved last year (a figure cut in half by the governor’s veto). It also contained moderated versions of many of the proposals in the House Republicans’ omnibus.

Rather than giving the state broad authority to force local school districts to open and operate charter schools, the legislation creates a statewide coordinator position. It also requires the state to follow standards when considering charter application appeals. The governor’s teacher bonus program — which would pay teachers between $5,000 and $15,000 for completing a year of teaching for the next three years — is now intent language asking districts to consider implementing similar incentives with increased funding.

The one conservative priority that emerged unscathed is increased funding districts receive for students participating in public home school programs. It would set the funding at 100% of brick-and-mortar students rather than 90%.

But perhaps the most surprising addition is an additional $500 per K-3 student eligible for reading interventions through the 2022 Alaska Reads Act. Districts have been warning that they lack the resources to properly implement the measure, which calls for additional tutors and other measures to help kids become proficient in reading by the end of grade 3. About 70% of K-3 students are estimated to qualify for the additional funding.

Many praised the inclusion of the funding as a proven way to improve reading skills in young students, pointing to other states that have made similar investments. It hadn’t been part of the Republicans’ omnibus, which means it came out of negotiations with the House Minority and Senate (whose negotiators were quick to signal support for the deal).

But for many progressives, the compromise deal was bittersweet. Several noted that the funding fell well short of what schools need to keep pace with inflation and that tough decisions around school closures and reduced programs are still required. They pointed to the need for continued work on education and a recognition that schools are not isolated from the harsh realities many children face outside of the classroom.

Rep. Genevieve Mina, D-Anchorage, noted many students are facing a “deeper crisis of poverty” that makes things like parental engagement and class attendance that are vaunted by Republicans difficult for everyone to achieve. She said schools should be seen as a hand-up that provides students with opportunities to learn and grow and that the Legislature should be looking for more ways to lift students up.

“Those were opportunities that were afforded to me because of the investment this state had in public education,” she said. “We can still do that, and I see this as one step in a movement forward to figure out how we can do better for our kids because this state and previous legislators did that for me.”

For conservatives, it was an opportunity to demand more from schools. Even though the money falls far short of keeping pace with inflation and will still require many districts to make deep cuts, Eagle River Republican Rep. Dan Saddler said it’s now on the “education establishment” and students to prove that investing in their education is worth it. He also said he expects that the internet upgrades for remote schools will “eliminate” the disparities between rural and urban schools as if the sole difference in achievement has been 75 megabits of internet speed.

“We’ve done our part,” he said, “and we look to the education establishment and our children, who are going to be sitting here in 20 years, that this is a worthwhile investment. We’ve done the best we can do. Now you do the best you can do.”

Others belittled the idea that schools should be teaching beyond reading, writing and arithmetic, with Rep. Sarah Vance — a legislator who once attacked high school students on social media for failing to properly address her by her title — stating that schools need to get over their “savior syndrome.”

Other Republicans were less scorching in their appraisal of the public education system, but not many. I mostly heard thinly veiled vitriol aimed at the educators, teachers unions and students who dared ask for adequate funding. Rep. Mike Cronk, a Tok Republican who is quick to remind us that he is a former teacher when he insists that increasing baseline education funding won’t make a difference, said at one point that it was totally “unacceptable” that kids were engaged on the issue. In a speech so wildly out of touch with students that you have to wonder if Cronk has ever been in a classroom, he claimed they were being used as unknowing props.

I can’t even bring myself to clip that speech because I think it illustrates a disturbing and demeaning approach to kids that’s all too common in conservative circles — this suggestion that kids are simply the property of their parents with no autonomy or right to self-determination — so instead, I will close out this section by highlighting the rebuttal from Bethel Democratic Rep. CJ McCormick, who served up a lesson on just how intelligent and engaged young people are.

“I just have to say I take a lot of issue with that because I remember when I was a kid in school, and I remember a lot of the kids I went to school with — a smart bunch of people. We knew what we were saying, and we knew what we were doing. We knew the reality that we lived. Those young people have every right to articulate the experience they were going through, and we have an obligation to listen to them,” he said. “They’re not props. They’re human beings.”

Here’s the full speech:

Follow the thread: The House amends and passes education deal

What’s next

The Senate, whose members have been directly involved in these negotiations, is expected to pass the bill on Monday. What’s next with Gov. Mike Dunleavy is an unknown, but there are indications he’s fuming that his teacher bonus program wasn’t included in the bill. Because this is a legislative bill rather than a budget bill, he can only veto the bill as a whole and cannot issue a line-item veto to the base student allocation language. That isn’t the end of the grief the governor could inflict, though, as the bill and its provisions still need to actually be funded through the budget, where the governor could line-item veto the funding.

While I once would have said it’s unthinkable for even the most conservative of governors to veto school funding, I was proved wrong last year when Dunleavy cut the one-time funding approved by the Legislature in half.

Still, it was always unlikely that the governor would get his way on the education bill. As the early votes showed, the Dunleavy-aligned House Majority doesn’t exactly wield significant power with its 20-member core of Republicans. Not only could they not muster the votes to get their omnibus on the floor or to insert the governor’s bonus program into the bill via an amendment (carried by Rep. Cronk), but they also faced the reality that they needed to approve a title change to the Senate bill.

Title changes are needed when the scope of a bill is altered and require a two-thirds majority of a chamber to approve. Even if the far-right caucus-less Wasilla Republican Rep. David Eastman wanted to play ball with a House Majority that had just stripped him of his one committee assignment, they still wouldn’t have had the votes to get the bill across the finish line. The House Minority was always going to have significant sway in dictating the scope of the final bill.

Whether the governor will undermine the deal to get his way is yet to be seen. Still, he’s also shown plenty of willingness to ignore the Legislature and invent the legal justification for what he wants to do anyway.

Stay tuned.

My recent stories for The Alaska Current

Weekend watching

Alaska’s Alissa Pili tore it up while playing in high school and found yet another gear in her final two years of college ball at Utah — where she was named the Pac-12 Player of the Year — and is expected to be a top pick in the WNBA draft. Her inspiring story was told in an excellent profile — How family has been the driving force of Alissa Pili’s evolution into a star — and here’s the Ute’s profile:

Have a nice weekend, y’all.

The Alaska Memo by Matt Buxton

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