By BOB GRIFFIN
Governor Dunleavy was right to propose direct bonus payments to teachers. He understands that most of the money we dedicate to K-12 gets intercepted before it makes it to classroom teachers.
In the 2023-24 school year, Alaska spent $576 million for salaries for 7,315 teachers statewide, according to the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development. That was just 19.6% of the total $2.93 billion in K-12 expenditures Alaska made that year, according to the National Education Association (NEA). That means over 80% of what Alaskan’s spent on educating their kids went to buildings, bureaucracies and other elements, instead of direct compensation for teachers.
Between 2004-2024 average Alaska teacher salaries increased just 51.3% according to the NEA, while Alaska inflation was 59.7%. At the same time, overall, per student spending in Alaska increased 99.0% from $11,432/student to $22,747/student.
The actual spending on K-12 for kids in traditional brick-and-mortar schools in Alaska was closer to $28,000/student/year because of 23,000 correspondence school students who only accounted for about 4% overall K-12 expenditures.
In 2023-24, the 7,315 teachers in Alaska were charged with educating 119,096 students in Average Daily Attendance (ADA) — or 16.3 students per teacher. The actual student to teacher ratio for Alaska kids in traditional brick-and-mortar schools is significantly lower — when considering the 23,000 correspondence school students.
Correspondence programs average ratios of 110 students per teacher. That means the more traditional schools in Alaska only had 13.5 students in average daily attendance per teacher – slightly lower than the US average of 13.9 according to the NEA.
The trend of teachers becoming a smaller share of overall expenditures not unique to Alaska. It literally takes more than twice as many adult employees to educate our kids as it did a few decades ago – and the results are arguably worse.
No other industry sector has experienced this level of productivity implosion. In 1950 it took 52 school employees per 1,000 students to run US schools. In 2020 it took 135. It would be hard to imagine a grocery store staying in business very long if they had to pay for more than double the number of checkout clerks they had in 1970’s, for a store of the same size.
Underutilization of facilities is also robbing resources from classrooms. The Anchorage School District currently has the capacity for roughly 25,000 students in K-5 elementary schools. By their own projections, ASD will have only around 12,000 kids in those schools by 2029 — when considering the large number of K-5 kids in correspondence and charter school programs that are not housed in ASD facilities.
When combining facility underutilization with the rapid escalation in the cost to build and maintain school building, we can start to build the picture of how we diverting more resources away from our educators and their classrooms.
In 2015, ASD did a major renovation of Airport Heights Elementary School — extending some classrooms, adding a multi-purpose room, a music room and mechanical room. That project cost a little over $20 million, including planning. The previous year, Winterberry Charter School was able to construct their entire campus, from and undeveloped site, with roughly the same student enrollment as Airport Heights, for $3.5 million.
With the backdrop of severe underutilization of elementary floorspace, ASD is now in the middle of a $50 million project to double the size of Inlet View Elementary School, while the remaining underutilized ASD campuses have more than $1 Billion in deferred maintenance.
Alaska dedicates a lot of resources to K-12 – about 5% of our state GDP — higher than every other state except Wyoming. That’s a higher percentage of GDP than the US government contributes to defense spending.
The quality of teachers is critical to success of students. Teachers in Alaska and across the US, should be upset that buildings and bureaucracies appear to be a higher priority than their pay.
Bob Griffin is on the board of Alaska Policy Forum and served on the Alaska Board of Education and Early Development.
Thanks Bob for the numbers. We need to get these numbers out there so people can see how their money is being wasted.
Alaska Education Reform and Local Control Act…too simple to imagine?
Bob, teachers are nearly only getting reached out to personally by NEA paid soldiers. Anyone carrying the weight of facts they wish teachers would better understand: Invite us to a coffee chat; come to our kids’ games and chat with us in the stands; be company for a single parent teacher on a Costco run. Thanks to bad school turnover, many teachers come up quickly from Outside, and only the union feeds them info.
We need conservative folks to build real relationships with teachers. Many are hurting, or jaded, or just afraid that asking questions will cost them their job. Many are women that have a high need for security and no drama.
Those who want to be in a network to help connect with teachers can reach out at LibertyLeaders (dot) org, a new Alaskan conservative network looking to stitch up the unhelpful fractures in our Republican factions. We need folks to step up and be hope for my amazing colleagues.