By MICHAEL TAVOLIERO
The Alaska education industry influenced the Alaska State Legislature to increase the Base Student Allocation by $680 per student. Fortunately they couldn’t influence Gov. Michael J. Dunleavy. The education industry used its own definition of education to work its magic on legislators.
Are we really going kick this can down the same road for Alaska education? Lift profit over humanity? Debt and decline over productivity and progress? Present over future?
This writer reminds the reader when he was a young whippersnapper in grammar school hearing for the first time that in the South during the days of slavery it was illegal to teach a slave to read; I was astonished.
That memory stuck with me as an ingenious evil designed to proffer the results of instruction and trample the potential for education. The comparison of instruction and education are the seminal differences between mediocrity and enlightenment as well as bondage and liberty.
It wasn’t hard to instruct a slave how to work in the fields or maintain livestock or even to keep up a household.
It was a practiced exercise. Once learned and embraced with body memory, it did not have to be re-instructed unless there was a technological change. Remember Ely Whitney. The introduction of this new technology in the South was responsible for the increase in slave population from 700,000 to over 3.2 million.
This ensured the least amount of thought and intellect as possible and provoked the maximum amount of exhaustion to produce a near zero amount of creativity. The brain is a muscle. Once exercised and stretched it does not return to its original size, however, instruction does not exercise the mind when compared to education.
The practice of instilling and maintaining illiteracy amongst slaves was the linchpin in keeping power and control. It was and still is the critical and integral component in establishing the sociological road map to curtail all other avenues of human endeavor other than obedience and monotony.
As of 2019, PEAKS (Performance Evaluation for Alaska’s Schools) was administered to students in Grades 3-9 (English language arts and mathematics) and grades 4, 8 and 10 (science) each spring during the state designated testing window. This state-required assessment provided students the opportunity to show their understanding of important skills in these content areas at their grade level.
It was designed to measure performance, productivity and outcome.
In 2020, I analyzed Alaska education performance through PEAKS analysis in both English Language Arts (ELA) and Math.
In the Anchorage School District, I found a lack of proficiency in ELA and math to be 41.79% and 40.30% respectively. The average math proficiency in the Organized Borough was 39.45 percent and in the Unorganized Borough it is 25.17 percent and an average English language arts (ELA) proficiency in the Organized Borough was 44.30 percent and in the Unorganized Borough it is 28.85 percent.
This proved disturbing and tragic. The Last Frontier’s overly abundant financial capacity to build well educated men and women from scratch had produced no remarkable results outside a dismal low ranking when compared nationally to other states in performance per student and a very high ranking in cost per student.
My conclusion to these findings brings me full circle back to considering how our current government education industry must define education to remain profitable. And that definition is simple: The state shall not let education funding follow the student.
It is time Alaska embraced the direction Espinoza V Montana Dept. of Revenue’s decision. It is time to end the mini-Blaine amendment in our state constitution. It fails to serve the state’s future and in fact results in the mediocrity and bondage of our progeny.
Michael Tavoliero is a writer at Must Read Alaska.
