The Education Governor

 Trigger warning: the following contains political commentary.

🏫🏫Governor Mike Dunleavy wants to position himself as the education governor but has failed miserably on all counts. He claims to be an expert on education because he was a teacher –so was Don Young– but as the saying goes, building one bridge doesn’t make you an engineer. He claims to have worked in bush education for twenty years, but according to his bio, he wasn’t certified until 1991 and moved to Wasilla in 2004; you do the math. While in education, he taught for a few years. He quickly worked his way up to superintendent, never staying in any job long enough to create any impact on student learning or educational programs. As program manager for the Statewide Mentor Project, he was just that, a manager. He walked into a well-developed, cutting-edge mentoring program for new teachers, the strength of which derived from master teachers in the program, not him. 

👜👜As far as I can tell, Dunleavy has been governor longer than he has held any other job. As governor, Dunleavey has vetoed funds for schools, blocked attempts to increase the base student allocation, and denied attempts to provide defined-benefit retirement or social security contributions for teachers. His reading program is a paper tiger. This program merely identified educational elements that already exist and should or already are part of the Department of Education or school district programs. What it doesn't do is solve the biggest problem in Alaska education, a lack of experienced highly qualified teachers– more on that later.

📈📉📊Dunleavey recently cited a research study of charter schools, claiming that Alaska’s charter schools are the best in the nation. First, that is not what the study tells us, and it’s just one small study. Secondly, if our charter schools are doing so well why does he want to wrench their control from the districts and put it in the hands of his administration, which has shown no acumen for educational improvement? While it is true that charter school students perform at a higher level than public school students. There is a reason for that. Generally speaking, charter school students and their families are more invested in student learning, and charter schools attract some of the best teachers because teachers like working in the charter school environment with motivated kids and families and more professional control over instruction. 

📚📚📚What Governor Dunleavy should do is look at the plethora of research into how best to improve student learning. He would find that the best way to improve student achievement is to provide each student with a highly qualified, experienced teacher. – Actually, he probably knows that, but it doesn’t match his agenda. Yes, research shows this over and over. Students who are placed in a classroom room with a well-trained, skilled teacher perform at a higher level than students with inexperienced, underqualified teachers. This is the greatest impact on student growth over anything else done to improve schools.

👫👫👫👭👬What should be obvious then is that what Alaska needs to do is recruit, train, and retain more highly qualified, experienced teachers. Recruitment is a challenge because teachers are expensive and in short supply. Yes, there is a national teacher shortage and a good teacher has lots of options many of them better than Alaska. If you want the pick of the litter you can’t be last in line, and compared to other states, Alaska is in the back of the pack for salaries, retirement, and benefits. Once we recruit teachers, we have to keep them – the good ones at least– and that means good retirement pay and benefits. Until we become more competitive, we will have trouble recruiting new teachers and will lose good teachers to better opportunities elsewhere.

💸💸💰The first step toward being more competitive is the proposed defined-benefit retirement program, which Dunleavy opposes in favor of a one-time teacher bonus. His proposed teacher bonus will do little except fund a spring break trip to Disneyland or pay moving expenses after the obligatory time commitment expires. We have to do better or success will continue to be out of reach. Little bonuses and redundant reading programs won’t fix what ails us.

📜📜📜📜📜I know it sounds like I think I’m some kind of expert, but I’m not. I would put my education credentials up against the Governor’s any time. — Raised in Alaska, Master's degree in Education, twenty-two years of classroom experience, Alaska Teacher of the Year (1999), ten years working in bush Alaska as a teacher mentor.