Michael Tavoliero: Alaska’s path to true local control in education

By MICHAEL TAVOLIERO

As a result of my July 2 article on financial literacy, I received a powerful and emotionally charged testimony (if you read the comments, you will find it) that directly underscores why my proposed Alaska Education Reform and Local Control Act (AERLCA) is not just a bureaucratic restructuring, but a moral and cultural imperative, particularly for rural and Alaska Native communities.

The commentator asked and answered: “There is no housing development, and if the regional housing authority builds housing, eligibility is based on poverty level to live in those homes. How is an Alaska Statewide Educational System supposed to teach financial survival to students in communities where financial opportunities, infrastructure, and concepts do not even exist? If the schools want to start instilling financial savvy into the curriculum, start by educating the kids about the value of minerals that their families own as shareholders of Alaska Native Corporations.”

The central question is “How can schools teach financial literacy in villages with no banks, no markets, and no infrastructure?” These and other questions posed are exactly the kind of question that a top-down, one-size-fits-all state education system cannot answer. The current Department of Education and Early Development, through uniform mandates and disconnected curriculum standards, fails to reflect the real economic, cultural, and land-based realities of Alaska’s rural students.

The AERLCA addresses this by returning curriculum design and spending decisions to the local level, enabling communities to teach what matters most in their unique context: land ownership, subsistence rights, resource stewardship, and economic self-determination. These are lessons that no bureaucrat in Juneau can design nor shouldn’t try to.

Under the current system, financial education is often reduced to vague, urban-centered abstractions, credit scores, mortgages, job interviews, while ignoring the fact that many of Alaska’s youth are shareholders in the largest blocks of private indigenous land on Earth. The value of that land, minerals, resources, and sovereignty, is almost never taught. Why? Because centralized curricula don’t see these children as landowners, only as data points in a failing system.

The AERLCA empowers regional and local authorities to teach these truths. Imagine a curriculum designed by and for Alaska Native educators that includes:

• Mapping out Native Corporation land holdings;
• Understanding shareholder rights and dividend structures;
• Teaching negotiation, land lease valuation, and mineral rights;
• Challenging dependency narratives with ownership narratives.

This is not just financial literacy. This is generational economic empowerment rooted in sovereignty.

The speaker’s frustration with “outside people making decisions for us” cuts to the heart of the colonial-style governance embedded in Alaska’s education system today. When administrators and DEED bureaucrats operate from afar, with no cultural context and no skin in the game, the result is a system designed to preserve dependency rather than foster independence.

AERLCA reorients power by letting local communities govern their own schools, control their own education dollars, and choose the voices that teach their children. It is the antidote to the very dynamic this testimony decries: the “puffing up” of non-profit executives and consultants who profit off community dysfunction.

One of the most striking insights is the idea that children are being raised with a false cultural lesson that confrontation is wrong, “that they are worth less than the tundra.” The current education system, dominated by ideological conformity and centralized control, does not foster emotional intelligence or assertiveness. It teaches compliance, submission, and silence, especially in Native communities that are viewed through a lens of paternalism.

By breaking up monopolistic school districts and empowering indigenous community-based schools and curriculum, AERLCA can help teach students how to confront respectfully, advocate effectively, and take pride in their heritage, not just as a culture to be preserved, but as a foundation for sovereignty and prosperity.

This testimony is a call to action: “I cannot believe this is all our ancestors hoped and prayed for us to experience.” 

Neither can I. The Alaska Education Reform and Local Control Act is the legislative vehicle for restoring what was lost. It is not just education quality, but dignity, agency, and self-governance.

It does not impose values. It returns the tools for communities to define their own.

And that is not just reform.

It is redemption.