Broken schools

Last week our legislature’s House Education Committee heard testimony on HJR 1 that proposes to amend our state’s constitution to allow public money (vouchers) to be spent on private and religious schools. While I do not want to use this space to comment on the merit of vouchers, I do want to respond to former Anchorage Mayor Tom Fink’s testimony that public schools are broken. I don’t believe that this is true for our schools in Alaska, or, that he has taken the time to fully disaggregate the data to make such an assertion.

When you look at our schools on the Kenai, it is easy to point to indicators such as graduation rate or test scores to show that we are improving. We are headed in a positive direction, we are not broken. Last winter I was a finalist for the Anchorage School District Superintendent job. My research on ASD revealed a lot of positive work that is not readily known to the public. I learned that while ASD may not be performing as well it wants, it is improving. When you consider the district’s increasing number of challenges e.g., educating refugees who do not speak English, you can only conclude that ASD is not broken. If it were, their results would be much worse. Finally, I recently asked a long term rural Alaska school district superintendent about how the level of social dysfunction is changing in the district’s villages. The immediate response is that things are far worse then they were 15 years ago. Yet, this district’s test scores and graduation rate are improving in spite of this limitation. My simple analogy is that of watering your lawn with a leaky hose. This district has more leaks in its hose but, it is getting more water to the lawn. The district’s schools do not have the achievement level that they want, but they are not broken.  It is important to note that there is an achievement gap between Alaska’s students who live in poverty and their peers who do not. Although this gap persists, we need to recognize that there has been a gradual improvement on both sides to suggest that our schools are not broken.

In sum, proposing to use public money for private schools is an important debate that we need to have. It is also important however, to not cage this debate on misleading information. Public schools are not broken. If they were, we would see a regression of results, not improvements. Everyone in public education recognizes the need to continuously improve; let’s embrace this need and not undermine it with misleading information.