OPINION: Judging the Alaska Legislature on education

NAACP families value academic instruction from public schools. It also turns out that reading and math skills amount to a test of whether the Legislature meets the Constitution’s education clause. Judge Sharon Gleason ruled in 2007 that the Legislature must provide “a meaningful opportunity to acquire proficiency to all children.”

In the case of Moore v. Alaska, the judge had heard that 60%-80% of students tested proficient in math and reading statewide. With that, she denied most of the student plaintiffs’ claims of inadequate instruction. She concluded that legislators had largely met their constitutional duty to maintain a legally adequate school system.

Nevertheless, Gleason made three other decisions at the time. They’re important now in calculating how much the state should support schools under the law.

First, she clarified that the legal duty to maintain adequate schools lies squarely with the Legislature, although it can delegate work to school districts and the education board.

Second, Gleason defined a legal floor for education adequacy. She said that bad conditions don’t affect the Legislature’s duty to maintain public schools. The judge added, “If basic learning is not taking place for a substantial majority of a school’s children, then the Constitution places the obligation upon the Legislature.” She didn’t say that funding schools depended on whether the Legislature thought the state could afford it.

Third, Gleason made academic success the barometer for school adequacy. She explained that funding for public education becomes inadequate when it doesn’t “accord to children a meaningful opportunity to be educated.” She relied on academic scores to show whether funding was legally adequate.

In a series of events after the students lost their Moore case, the effectiveness of reading and math instruction plummeted. The state education department raised benchmarks to the rest of the country in 2014. Students immediately scored lower. The Legislature further stalled classroom teacher support. Classes ballooned beyond the size for effective learning and scores fell again. The ratio of classroom teachers to students has recently reached the bottom rank among the states.

The loss of classroom teachers means that only a minority of Alaska’s 128,000 K-12 students now do math and reading at their grade level. At a neighborhood school in Anchorage before COVID-19, for example, only 20% of first- to third-graders became good readers, the lowest rate in town. Those students also had the most crowded primary classrooms in the school district.

Although providing for student proficiency is a chief duty of the Legislature, its decisions have made the state’s schools largely inadequate under the constitution.

Mike Bronson volunteers for the Anchorage branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He wrote this commentary on behalf of the Anchorage NAACP’s education committee.

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