Senate President Gary Stevens of Kodiak said last week that years of “flat funding and high inflation has pushed our public education system into crisis.”
A leader in the group of legislators advocating for vast amounts of new formula funding to pay teachers at Alaska public schools, Stevens was responding to Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s education funding and reform package, which was released last week along with House Bill 76 and Senate Bill 82.
“Currently, teachers have many classrooms above 40 students which decreases their individual impact on students, schools are closing because of financial distress, and families are leaving this state because of the lack of opportunities and stability,” Stevens said.
Read Sen. Stevens’ statement here.
Schools are closing because people are not having kids in many communities, such as Anchorage and Juneau, and there isn’t a need for so many schools anymore.
According to the Alaska Department of Labor, the outmigration in Alaska is actually lower in 2023 than the 10-year and 20-year averages. People are leaving at a lower rate, but the outmigration trend is not being matched by new arrivals, something that is not due to education, but lack of economic opportunity.
Forty students per teacher is a provably false, and Stevens, as a life-long educator, knows it. There are few, if any schools in Alaska with classes that have 40 or more students in them.
Data suggests that the average class size in Alaska’s high schools is around 18-20 students. The only classes in Alaska that might have more than 40 students may be Anchorage physical education, band, student government, or choir classes.
Anecdotally, there was a robotics teacher in Anchorage who needed more students so put out the call to get more, and more than 40 signed up. That is the number that the Anchorage Teachers Association (NEA) is using when they are bargaining for more money.
The House and Senate have agreed to a working group negotiation with the governor to see if there is a place they can agree on when it comes to education funding and accountability.
Here are the actual teacher-student ratios from around Alaska, with Anchorage averaging higher due to having correspondence and homeschool programs, where one teacher is assigned to many non-campus students who are learning at home.
Juneau now has only 1 Middle School, Thunder Mtn MS formerly Thunder Mtn HS. One high school which is Juneau-Douglas. The CBJ says Juneau’s population is declining causing drop in student enrollment. I believe this to be false just by the amount of traffic and people we have here. One number I’d like to see is how many students are being home schooled.
Doesn’t match my experience. I know many people with families who bailed for the sake of their families.
DOGE needs to start in Juneau.
Just wait until DODGE-AK907 is in full operations and finds gross – willful – malicious … “Waste, Fraud, and Abuse” and it all leads back to the elected leaders. Alligator Tears & Screems – Wailing will be the sounds of guilt!
Wow. There were a lot more kids in classes when I was attending school in Anchorage. And my education was better that what they’re getting these days.
I remember 30-35 in my elementary classes in the 80s. But we were relatively well minded and respected authority. Many if not most of these kids now days are messed up, with discipline issues and short attention spans, and worse. It’s insane what teachers have to put up with. There is no way one teacher can be effective with that many kids these days, it’s nothing short of baby sitting at best. 40 or more is truly insane.
The House Finance Committee listened to Representative Kopp give a 2 hour presentation today on why public employees deserve a much more generous pension than they now receive. The presentation was filled with the same sort of untruths that legislators hear and repeat on education funding.
What isn’t a lie is that the state has lost 75 percent of its annual oil production and the remaining oil is become more costly to find and extract.
Never,never trust or vote for a Democrat or “Independent”, never.
I like MRAK in general but it is definitely math challenged on many articles where they try to deal with numbers.
So Stevens says “many” classes have more than 40 students. This article suggests however that because the student to teacher ratio averages less than this, then therefore “forty students per teacher is a provably false” [sic].
So the logic goes that an average of 18-20 student to teacher ratio “proves” there are not many classes with 40 or more students. Looks like somebody doesn’t understand what “average” means (pun intended).
Let me demonstrate: Say 9 people have $100. A 10th person has only $1. I might say “many of the people have at least $100”. The author would say my claim is demonstrably false, indeed that nobody has $100, because the average amount of money the 10 people have is $90.10. Who is right?
You can’t use an average to disprove the claim of 40 or more students in many classes. And student to teacher ratio is NOT the same as students per class. You might have a class with 5 kids because they are especially intense, and another with 40 — that’s just too much. Especially 40 kids now days with their messed up entitled lib parents and short attention spans.
How was it possible that I got a first class education when nearly all of my class sizes in public school in Alaska were at least 30 students, no “teacher’s aides” and only one principal? Impossible.
A politician and teacher lied for political (monetary) gain?
No. That could never happen. Especially in Alaska.
Sorry but good policy is not what we need in education.
We need attention to outcomes and good attendance. Neither requires good policy changes.
All that does is get into the weeds and is usually recommended by no policy winks that don’t know anything about
Education but the data they read!
We need our
Elected officials to hold people accountability’