South Anchorage high school teacher Logan Pitney said his colleagues are making exit strategies to flee their bad financial prospects in Alaska. He called Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s teacher retention bonus plan a “Band-Aid on an arterial bleed.”
Juneau Superintendent Frank Hauser called the governor’s charter policy change proposal a “statewide solution without a statewide problem.”
They were among dozens of teachers and school administrators that rejected Dunleavy’s education policy proposals in legislative hearings in Juneau last week.
Now legislators must balance that opposition with the governor’s threat to undo their education policy, including historic funding for schools and districts, if they don’t also pass his proposals.
Teacher retention bonuses
There’s no debate that Alaska has a teacher retention problem. The number of statewide teacher vacancies at the beginning of the school year has more than tripled since 2020.
But the governor’s policy would change how the state tackles the issue. While legislators passed a bill that if funded would allow districts to raise teacher salaries, the governor’s proposal instead would pay teachers annual bonuses for three years as an experiment to see if the cash would incentivize them to stay.
Alaska Education Commissioner Deena Bishop said that, though studies are inconclusive about the efficacy of bonuses, it is what teachers want.
“We’re looking at if that would be able for us to compete, not only in Alaska with other sectors that teachers can certainly work in, but also in other states,” she said.
Dunleavy recognized the teacher retention issue and assigned a task force to study and address the problem in 2020. Its research found that competitive salaries and a return to the state’s defined benefit pension system were most likely to keep teachers in their jobs. In a survey of people with active teaching licenses in Alaska, bonuses did not make the top 10 most important reasons to continue teaching, although “annual retention incentives” did.
The governor’s proposal would come at a cost to the school funding increase, Senate President Gary Stevens, R-Kodiak, said. He asked Bishop if the state’s school funding mechanism was the wrong way to increase teacher salaries.
Bishop did not answer directly, but said teacher salaries did not go up when the federal government invested millions in schools to keep them open during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Senators on the committee criticized the comparison, and Bishop conceded that one-time funds are not typically used for salary increases.
Dozens of Alaska teachers summarily rejected the idea before the Senate Education Committee last.
Julianna Armstrong retired from the Anchorage School District after a 40-year teaching career. She said she owns a home, has health insurance and can afford modest travel because of her pension.
She seemed to take the bonus proposal as an insult: “Giving out occasional bribes is treating educators like naive children — ‘Look down at all that money in your hand. Don’t look in the distance at your empty future,’” she said. “A lump sum payment is a lump of coal. You can’t grow old depending on it.”
Chris Heidemann, president of the Juneau Education Association school union, said he was “ecstatic” that the governor is paying attention to teacher retention, but said bonuses are the wrong way to retain teachers. He said students and educators need an increase to per-student school funding, like the one envisioned in the bill Dunleavy has threatened to veto, because without increased funding districts will have to close schools and lay off teachers.
“If the governor chooses to veto that bill, every educator laid off across the state — and there will be many — will be able to draw a direct line from their pink slip to the governor’s office,” he said.
While bonuses garnered vanishingly little support from the people who would get them in at the Capitol for the last two weeks, there were a couple of teachers who wanted them.
Samuel Abney, a music teacher from Anchorage School District said teachers should take any kind of money they can get, and cited the dire financial circumstances of his colleagues. “I think any measure that we can possibly get from this governor to get any kind of money that we possibly could — from a Republican governor, in this state is — We should take it and not look a gift horse in the mouth.”
Charter school change
Dunleavy has proposed allowing his appointees on the state’s Board of Education and Early Development approve or deny charter schools, with an aim to increase their presence in the state.
Charters in Alaska are currently approved by the local school district in which they plan to operate.
In a House Education Committee this week, Russ Simnick of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools said Alaska is one of only five states to use this method and added that additional authorizers could increase the number of Alaska’s charter schools.
He said his organization finds that sometimes districts may not authorize as many charters as other groups. “They may not embrace or may even be hostile to chartering,” he said. “And we also find that one of the biggest drawbacks with just allowing local education agencies is they have a lot of times a very traditional mind, and they don’t have the appetite for innovation that charter schools do.”
But in Senate Education Committee meetings this week, Alaska districts resisted the idea that they need more authorizers to increase charter presence. Current charters and districts said their schools are so successful because districts and charters work together from the charter schools’ inception.
Anchorage School District Superintendent Jharrett Bryantt said the best way to support the charter schools his district operates would be to increase the student funding formula amount.
“Charter schools are making difficult budgetary decisions such as exhausting their fund balances and making reductions to key supports just as districts across the state are doing,” he said. He pointed to one charter in its district that plans to lay off two teachers, two paraprofessionals and a custodian to make ends meet next year.
Anchorage School Board President Margo Bellamy said she was “baffled” by the proposal because the school and the district work so closely together. “I just think to disrupt that, it just seems like an unnecessary disruption for us to remove that from under the school board,” she said.
They could not find an instance in school records where ASD had denied a charter application.
Fairbanks school board President Brandy Harty has children in local charter schools. She said that to her knowledge, her district has not denied a charter applicant and she couldn’t imagine the state doing a better job than the district.
“If you go through our board policies and how we do it, there is no way the state is going to send people to Fairbanks to hold public hearings to best inform our public to gather public support to do the robust process that we provide for our charters,” she said. “There doesn’t seem to be a good reason to fix a system that isn’t broken.”
Only one district reported denying a charter application. The state’s Education Department upheld the denial when the applicants appealed it.
What to expect
At stake is a far-reaching education bill that would substantially raise the formula for per-student funding, known as the base student allocation, for the first time since 2017 and increase the internet speeds rural schools can afford.
If Dunleavy does not sign or veto the bill by Thursday, it will become law without his signature. But he could later veto any funding to turn the policy change into reality in the next school year by striking funding with line item vetoes when he is presented with the budget.
Alaska lawmakers narrowly rejected teacher bonuses and a change to charter school rules before they approved the far-reaching education reform bill in February.
The policies have not yet resurfaced in new bill proposals or as additions to existing legislation. The governor’s bonus plan, Senate Bill 97 and House Bill 106, is in committee in both houses.
Lawmakers passed the education bill with enough votes for a veto-proof majority, the strength of which will be tested if the governor makes good on his threat.
• Claire Stremple is a reporter based in Juneau who got her start in public radio at KHNS in Haines, and then on the health and environment beat at KTOO in Juneau. This article originally appeared online at alaskabeacon.com. Alaska Beacon, an affiliate of States Newsroom, is an independent, nonpartisan news organization focused on connecting Alaskans to their state government.
