After its presentation at the joint Senate and House Education Committee meeting on February 19, the Alaska Municipal League shared a list of Public School Mandates with the committees.

Attached is a review of State statutes, which identifies what could be considered unfunded mandates. All that means is that these are obligations of school districts that don’t have specific funding tied to them.

Public debates often get reduced to simplistic, headline-friendly narratives. In Alaska, one of the most persistent false choices is the idea that increasing public education funding — by raising the Base Student Allocation, or BSA —must come at the expense of the Permanent Fund dividend (PFD). This framing suggests that policymakers and the public must choose between supporting schools and supporting individual Alaskans…

DEED sent out a press release on Wednesday, January 29th implying that Alaska’s state test scores have dropped across the board and that increased funding to districts would not improve student performance.

This is an inaccurate portrayal of the scores and requires not only clarification but a rebuttal.

This report from Beth Zirbes and Mike Bronson examines results from Alaska’s in-state academic assessments of public school students during the 2018-2019 school year to determine how much of the charter schools’ performance might be attributable to characteristics that students bring to the schools versus the education the schools provide.

Twenty years of data show how budget cut-backs for K-12 schools starting in 2007 predict both the loss of teachers and plunging student proficiencies in Alaska… This report by Mike Bronson, NAACP Anchorage education committee, looks at how the base student allocation (BSA) and the numbers of teachers correlate with the drop in student proficiency over recent years.