By MICHAEL TAVOLIERO
Alaska’s K–12 education system is collapsing under the weight of a bloated, centralized bureaucracy. Per Bob Griffin’s “Why aren’t teachers more upset?” June 30, 2025, MRAK piece, despite spending nearly $3 billion annually, about 5% of the state’s GDP, Alaska ranks near the bottom nationally in academic performance.
How many times and over how many years have writers at Must Read Alaska sounded the alarm? We have all diligently exposed the truth that Alaska’s education system is collapsing, not because of a lack of funding, but because it’s become a taxpayer-funded money tree for special interests instead of a pathway to student success. And yet, despite these warnings, how many Alaskans have looked the other way, stayed silent, or failed to act? The real shame isn’t just in the system’s failure.
It’s our collective complacency that allowed it to happen.
Griffin adroitly points out, in the 2023–24 school year, only 19.6% of K–12 education expenditures went to classroom teachers, according to the National Education Association. That means over 80% of the state’s education budget was diverted to non-instructional spending, including administration, facilities, and bureaucracy.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s proposal for direct teacher bonuses rightly targeted this imbalance, acknowledging that the current system shortchanges educators while rewarding inefficiency.
The Alaska Education Reform and Local Control Act (see MRAK, February 21, 2025, “Alaska Education Freedom and Local Control Act Would Establish Parent Education Accounts And More”) offers a twofold solution: massive cost savings and improved academic outcomes. The numbers are revealing. Alaska spent $576 million to pay 7,315 teachers in 2023–24, while total K–12 spending reached $2.93 billion. A reasonable administrative and managerial expense for Alaska’s K–12 system should be no more than $234 million per year. Anything significantly higher is a sign of bureaucratic bloat and misplaced priorities.
The remaining funds did not enhance education. They sustained an administrative empire.
Just like the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development, all 54 school district boards, and NEA-Alaska, none of these institutions teach a single child. Instead, they operate as part of a massive government money redistribution scheme. A scheme that the Alaskan public has largely been misled into supporting, driven by the loudest and most politically entrenched voices in the room.
Per-student spending nearly doubled between 2004 and 2024, from $11,432 to $22,747, yet teacher salaries only increased 51.3%, lagging the 59.7% rate of inflation. The financial discrepancy is not only unsustainable, but also morally bankrupt.
Is anyone listening to the warnings from Bob Griffin, Kevin McCabe, Suzanne Downing, David Boyle, and others? Alaska’s education system is not just failing; it is intellectually and financially bankrupt. The crisis is real, and without bold reform, we are condemning another generation of children to a future of dependency and decline.
Compounding the problem is Alaska’s underutilization of facilities. The Anchorage School District (ASD) projects only 12,000 K–5 students by 2029, despite maintaining capacity for 25,000. Yet instead of consolidating space, ASD is spending $50 million to expand Inlet View Elementary, while other half-empty campuses suffer from over $1 billion in deferred maintenance. Compare this to Winterberry Charter School, which built its entire facility for just $3.5 million. The contrast is clear: community-driven schools deliver results at a fraction of the cost.
This stark difference in outcomes is no accident. As Bob Griffin highlights, Alaska’s charter and correspondence schools educate more students with fewer staff and at significantly lower costs. These schools average 110 students per teacher. This frees up traditional schools to operate at an extremely low 13.5 student-to-teacher ratio. Yet instead of learning from this efficiency, Alaska’s education system continues to sink billions into buildings and bureaucracy, sidelining the very students and teachers it claims to serve.
The Alaska Education Reform and Local Control Act proposes a structural reset that puts students and communities, not bureaucracies, at the center of education. In 2023–24, Alaska spent $576 million on teachers, just a fraction of the $2.93 billion total K–12 budget. Administrative and managerial costs alone accounted for an estimated $234 million. By cutting just 10% of overall non-instructional spending, including waste in bloated district offices and underutilized facilities, the state could free up nearly $300 million per year. That’s money that could go directly into teacher pay, student programs, or back into the pockets of Alaskans through tax relief. In real terms, this isn’t just a reform, it’s a recovery of misused public funds for the benefit of children, educators, and taxpayers.
Importantly, the Act is also grounded in strong legal precedent. In Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states cannot exclude religious schools from publicly funded education programs. This decision, alongside Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer (2017) and Carson v. Makin (2022), reaffirms that education funding must follow students regardless of whether they choose secular or religious institutions. These decisions strengthen the constitutional foundation of the Alaska Education Reform and Local Control Act and support policies that prioritize parental choice and student needs over bureaucratic preservation.
Governor Dunleavy’s direct bonus plan for teachers was a step in the right direction, recognizing that educators are the cornerstone of student success. But more than one-time bonuses are needed. We must overhaul the way Alaska delivers education. With targeted reinvestment into teachers and streamlined, community-focused governance, we can improve Alaska’s bottom-five national rankings in math, reading, and graduation rates.
This is more than an efficiency issue, it’s a moral one. Alaska’s education system, as currently designed, dooms too many of its children to lives of dependency, poverty, and disillusionment. It fails to prepare them for the economic and civic responsibilities of adulthood. It traps families in a cycle of low expectations and limited opportunity.
If we do nothing, we condemn another generation to academic failure and economic dependence. But if we act to support and pass the Alaska Education Reform and Local Control Act, we will save our children, restore purpose to public education, and reclaim a future of independence, prosperity, and dignity.
This is not just a conservative proposal. It is a necessary revolution. For the sake of Alaska’s children, teachers, and taxpayers, it’s time to stop funding failure and start funding the future.
Michael Tavoliero writes for Must Read Alaska.
Stop funding failure?
Does not compute to the average leftist. Just see…
“Green” energy
Homelessness
Education
Welfare
Immigration
…
…
.
Sane adults can talk all day long about funding failure, and doing something different, but the leftists in the legislature and in government positions will ignore rational thought, and keep throwing money at the problem.
As a conservative educator who works in and with Alaska’s public schools daily—not from a column, but from classrooms, BSP rooms, and staff meetings—I appreciate when the debate over education funding and reform is passionate. But I also expect it to be grounded in reality, not rhetoric. Michael Tavoliero’s piece in Must Read Alaska—echoing Bob Griffin, David Boyle, and others—makes some valid observations about inefficiency and underperformance, but it fails in the same place their proposals always do: it declares war on public education workers, not the actual causes of dysfunction.
Yes, Alaska’s education system needs reform.
No serious educator—conservative or not—believes our current outcomes are acceptable. We know Alaska ranks near the bottom in NAEP scores. We know rural schools struggle to recruit staff. We know administrative costs are high. We also know this: no real reform will succeed without listening to the people doing the work—teachers, paras, bus drivers, behavior support staff, and the folks who keep our buildings running.
Instead, Tavoliero suggests those of us in the system are part of a “taxpayer-funded redistribution scheme.” That’s not serious analysis—it’s a smear.
The 19.6% figure is misleading.
Citing that only 19.6% of education dollars go to classroom teachers ignores how schools operate. Public schools—especially in Alaska—don’t just pay teachers. We fund transportation across remote areas, heat buildings in subzero climates, serve kids with disabilities, feed hungry students, and provide support staff and security. Comparing that reality to a charter school in a rented church basement is apples to snow machines.
Also, cutting district-level operations by 10% sounds nice until you realize that means cutting HR that helps retain staff, finance offices that track compliance, and curriculum departments that train new hires. Let’s be smarter than the slogans.
Teacher bonuses are a start, not a solution.
Governor Dunleavy’s bonus proposal acknowledged the real frustration educators feel. But it’s telling that even that proposal came with no guarantees for long-term pay increases or healthcare improvements—and no plan to stabilize the workforce for the long haul. Why? Because the administration doesn’t want to invest in a career workforce. It wants to replace public education with a piecemeal voucher system, outsourced to whoever charges the least, regardless of transparency or long-term quality.
School boards and NEA don’t teach children—but they do represent them.
It’s true: NEA-Alaska, AASB, and DEED don’t teach students. Neither does the Legislature, the Governor, or MRAK. But school boards are locally elected, and unions exist to defend the rights of the people who do teach children. You may not like how they advocate, but dismissing them as parasites is both ignorant and dangerous.
There is no path to improved outcomes that doesn’t include retaining staff, addressing trauma, fixing special education shortages, and restoring trust in the system. That means partnering with—not vilifying—the people who actually show up every day to serve Alaska’s kids.
Real conservative reform means tightening, not torching.
We absolutely should review district office spending, repurpose underused facilities, and streamline duplicative services. But we should do that with local input, data-driven priorities, and respect for the Alaskans who rely on public schools. “Blow it all up” is not a policy—it’s a campaign slogan.
The Alaska Education Reform and Local Control Act offers a philosophy, not a plan. Its core mechanism—ESAs (Education Savings Accounts)—sounds flexible until you realize it invites privatized, unregulated schooling funded by public tax dollars. And once you dismantle districts and DEED, you can’t put that system back together again. If we’re wrong, there’s no recovery plan—just an experiment on the backs of Alaskan kids.
Conservatives should demand accountability and stability.
Public education can’t be rebuilt every time someone in Juneau wants to make headlines. A real conservative approach would involve:
Auditing district overhead and identifying duplication,
Consolidating underutilized facilities with community consent,
Investing in trades and workforce programs,
Strengthening school choice options within the public system,
And above all, rewarding long-term educators who’ve dedicated their lives to Alaska’s students.
We don’t need a revolution. We need restoration—of trust, respect, and responsibility.
So yes, we’re upset. But not because we fear reform. We’re upset because we see the difference between serious leadership and ideological crusades. One lifts Alaska up. The other tears it down and calls it progress.
Well stated, also in the 30+ years I have been involved in education in Alaska the state and federal mandates have become overwhelming. The amount of staff it takes to monitor and generate reports for some bureaucrat is ridiculous. The want to offer up the charter schools as being a great success, but they don’t want to look at the fact that they don’t take all students, they often exclude special education students especially the high needs students, they can dismiss students from their programs for minor infractions, etc. About 85% of the homeschooled students exempt out of state wide testing. While larger communities maybe able to consolidate schools, it is not the same for schools off the road system. If you close a school of 15 students where do they go? Do we go back to the ill-fated mandatory boarding schools for students who live in rural Alaska? Since Brown vs Board of Education people have been trying to segregate schools in a new way. We need to open up the dialogue with classroom teachers on what do they need to be successful? NEA-Alaska is that voice for many, but the far right wants to make them out to be the root of the problem. Why? The article talks about the percentage of increase, it fails to address the fact that fuel costs have tripled or more during that time, electricity has gone up proportionally as fuel has increased. Textbooks have skyrocketed, health care costs, etc. How many times have you seen a legislator or the governor in a school speaking at length with the teachers and support staff who are working tirelessly to help the students of Alaska?
Thanks, Mike. Duke would be proud of you. But, actually, the time to stop funding failure here in Alaska would have been 40 years ago.