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.
Green Energy, Homelessness, Education, Welfare, Immigration, Non-Profits, and many others XX Industrial Complexes are all cousins in the grift, ripping off the American taxpayer and his progeny.
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?
Hi there,
State and federal mandates have created overwhelming reporting burdens that distract from student instruction. The Alaska Education Reform and Local Control Act (AERLCA) is designed to streamline compliance by shifting reporting and oversight from centralized bureaucracy back to local control, where it belongs. Rather than hiring more district-level staff to satisfy mandates, the Act empowers local schools to use modern technology and lean teams to meet reporting requirements efficiently, without sacrificing instructional time. This approach ensures accountability without bloating the system.
Charter and homeschool programs work well because they’re more flexible, but that flexibility shouldn’t mean leaving out kids with special needs or skipping required tests. The AERLCA isn’t about turning schools over to private groups with no rules. It makes sure that any school receiving public money, whether it’s a charter or part of an Education Savings Account program, still has to follow state rules for accepting all students and taking part in statewide testing. If a school doesn’t play by those rules, it won’t get taxpayer dollars. The goal is to give families real choices without leaving any student behind.
The AERLCA does not mandate the closure of rural or village schools. In fact, it respects the unique logistical and cultural realities of off-road-system communities. Alaska’s current REAA system already supports many small, isolated schools that operate efficiently through local management and shared service models. AERLCA builds on this framework by allowing communities to maintain or even improve these schools through local governance, community-level budgeting, and the option to form regional consortia for administrative or specialty services—without being tethered to large, urban-centric school district bureaucracies. The goal is to empower rural communities, not consolidate them. Under AERLCA, village schools can remain viable and better funded, while avoiding the inefficiencies of urban districts that do not serve rural needs effectively.
More urgently, the logical outcome of the AERLCA is that endeavors from local level education expectations especially in the Bush to bring back the critical relationship and involvement of parents, students and teachers. This has been missing from Alaska’s public education system since statehood.
No reform denies the reality of cost pressures. AERLCA provides flexibility for localized budgeting, allowing communities to negotiate bulk energy contracts, shared transportation, and local procurement. By shifting oversight locally, schools can control energy and supply expenses without central red tape dictating purchases. The Act also promotes reinvestment of savings in rising cost areas like utilities and student health services.
You indicate that real reform must include teacher voices; far-right narratives often vilify NEA-Alaska without engaging actual educators, but AERLCA is built on community and educator participation. Rather than dismissing teacher unions or boards, the Act provides mechanisms for local advisory councils, with teachers, paras, custodial staff, and administrators, to help guide budgeting and instructional design. This is not anti-educator; it’s pro-educator empowerment. The far-right may try to exploit division, but the Act’s architecture invites collaborative improvement.
AERLCA institutionalizes community input, requiring local listening sessions, joint planning, and transparent decision-making with frontline educators. It encourages policy-makers, including the Governor and legislators, to engage regularly with local school councils and host on-site forums across a representative set of schools, urban, suburban, and rural.
Final thought. The Alaska Education Reform and Local Control Act isn’t about discarding public education. It’s about rebuilding it on principles of efficiency, equity, community control, and educator empowerment. It corrals real resources, not slogans, and gives Alaska’s children and the people who teach them a fighting chance.
Your rhetoric is outstanding. Do you even understand how REAA School Districts actually work? Do you think they actually don’t try and get the best price they can on everything? Do you think school boards aren’t actually interacting with their school staff to get input? Federal and state mandates require a great deal of reporting and you want to dump it on classroom teachers? Like they aren’t already over worked. Local control is already in place, REAA’s main boards come from across the district, and each site has an advisory school board. Spin it however you want but The Alaska Education Reform and Local Control Act is about going back to the days of separate but unequal education. The Alaska Constitution is clear “The legislature shall by general law establish and maintain a system of public schools open to all children of the State, and may provide for other public educational institutions. Schools and institutions so established shall be free from sectarian control. No money shall be paid from public funds for the direct benefit of any religious or other private educational institution.” stop trying to change it!
Hi Rick,
One would surmise as an educator, innovation is always on the horizon, if it improves educational performance and outcome. The Alaska Education Reform and Local Control Act does not declare war on teachers, paraprofessionals, or support staff. In fact, it redirects funding and decision-making authority closer to these very professionals, at the local school level, rather than maintaining bloated district bureaucracies. It is not anti-educator; it is anti-waste. The Act seeks to empower the actual educators by getting funding past the bureaucratic toll gates and into classrooms and communities that know their needs best.
Of course, public schools provide necessary services like heating, transportation, and food, especially in Alaska’s extreme conditions. But if more than 80% of the K–12 budget is consumed by everything except instruction, we must ask: Are those services being delivered efficiently and effectively? The 19.6% figure isn’t an insult. It’s a fiscal red flag. To another point the REAA’s represent a little over 10% of the entire Alaska student population and coupled with Molly Hotch …it was an extremely poor decision by the state which further deprived education to the Bush and instead focused education dollars to facility operation and maintenance.
Under AERLCA, high-cost overhead functions like duplicated district operations, underutilized facilities, and rigid administrative chains would be reviewed, consolidated, or eliminated. Services would continue, but delivered smarter, through localized, transparent control and non-duplicative systems. No child loses meals or transportation, but taxpayers stop paying for empty buildings and bloated management.
Every business and public agency in the 21st century has found ways to streamline HR, accounting, and support services, often regionally or through technology. Why should public education be exempt from the same scrutiny and efficiency standards?
The Act doesn’t call for eliminating HR. It calls for removing inefficiencies, not functions. HR especially public HR has become a spawning pool for DEI practices and policies, which have no place in education. HR services may be retained, but right-sized, de-duplicated, and repurposed with local community input. In many cases, consolidating back-office functions regionally or even outsourcing can increase efficiency while lowering cost, preserving more for frontline needs.
The Act’s purpose is not to outsource education to the “lowest bidder”, which says to me you haven’t read the act. The act intends to restore accountability to the highest priority: student success. Isn’t that the only mission and purpose of public education? Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) do give parents freedom to find the best educational fit for their children, whether that’s a homeschool co-op, a public charter, a Montessori school, or a vocational academy.
What’s missing from current policy is flexibility. Alaska’s status quo offers one option, district-controlled schooling, yet thousands of Alaskans have already opted out, choosing correspondence, charters, or private education despite receiving little or no public support. AERLCA simply says: follow the student, not the bureaucracy.
Unions and boards represent teachers. As evidenced by the recent HB57 push, too often, they prioritize protecting the system over improving student outcomes. When organizations spend more time lobbying for larger budgets and resisting reform than developing classroom excellence, they become gatekeepers of stagnation.
AERLCA does not aim to eliminate representation, but to re-balance power back to parents and local schools, allowing educators to innovate without union-imposed rigidity or district-level micromanagement.
While you confess that we need to retain staff, fix special ed shortages, and restore trust, which I agree with, this won’t happen by spending more on the same broken system. AERLCA supports retention by increasing autonomy, redirecting money to teacher pay and professional growth, and enabling schools to build their own responsive hiring pipelines. Let’s fix a broken system.
Special education? Trust? These require nimble, accountable, and student-first systems, not another decade of top-down mandates from DEED or district offices. Local schools can do more if given the power and resources to do so. If they’re not buried under centralized bureaucracy, could we improve with independent local control which restores performance and outcome? Seems to me we probably can do even better especially by developing a lasting productive relationship between parents, students and teachers.
The Alaska Education Reform and Local Control Act is a restoration. It restores:
Fiscal discipline, local accountability, parental choice, professional respect for teachers, and outcomes over institutions.
It is not a scorched-earth policy. It is a constitutional, Supreme Court–backed restructuring of a system that currently costs $28,000 per student and ranks near last in the nation. Would changing this outcome improve not just our state but the futures of its children?
ESAs are not untested. They’ve been implemented successfully in states like Arizona, Florida, and West Virginia. They increase satisfaction, reduce costs, and improve educational outcomes. They represent a flexible, parent-driven model that empowers families to tailor education without being locked into one-size-fits-all bureaucracy.
Alaska’s current system is the failed experiment. With ballooning costs, declining enrollment, teacher burnout, and poor academic performance, reform is not predicate, it is a necessity. AERLCA doesn’t gamble the future. It gives it back to those with the most at stake: parents, educators, and local communities.
Lastly, you appear to reflect a genuine concern and a heartfelt commitment to Alaska’s students, but I am under the assumption you misunderstand what AERLCA actually does. It doesn’t demonize teachers; it aims to liberate them. It doesn’t defund schools, it funds students. And it doesn’t destroy public education, it offers a lifeline to save it from irrelevance, inefficiency, and collapse.
Alaska doesn’t need more slogans—it needs reform. The Alaska Education Reform and Local Control Act delivers it.
Mr. Tavoliero, I generally agree with you, but you’re wasting your time engaging with Rick.. He has his Union blinders firmly in place. Gmmne!! Gimme!! No moneu! No money!! The education comes in far behind the needs of paying off the Democrats to feed the beast. Gotta keep the gravy train chugging!!
Real nice blah, blah, blah but you fail to address the problem. Our students are FAILING under your system and you refuse to acknowledge it much less give a solution. That makes you part of the problem. Your idea of fixing the problem by adding more money and more money to a failed system is a failure in itself. So far your methods have not worked so why keep doing the same thing over and over and expect different results?
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.
Duke and I had an interesting relationship. I truly grieved when I lost that friend.