OPINION: Supporting Alaska schools shouldn’t be a hard choice for legislators

In my district, my legislators (House District 11, Rep. Julie Coulombe, and Senate District F, Sen. James Kaufman) sent out fliers early on claiming that they were pro-education candidates, in spite of the fact that Coulombe failed to vote to override Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s veto of Senate Bill 140, which had previously passed both chambers with large margins, and which included her vote. (Give Kaufman credit for voting to override.) This bill would have gone a long way toward fixing our education problems, but Coulombe and 18 others, Republicans all, prevented that from happening, in effect relinquishing their legislative powers and responsibilities to Dunleavy. Coulombe and Kaufman, while claiming that they were champions of education, in fact contributed to the extended chaos in the Legislature that we witnessed last session, which resulted in second- or third-best temporary education “fixes.”

Funding an essential public service should not be endlessly complicated, and when people go out of their way to create complications, I smell a rat. The very smelly rodent here is the desire to privatize by the back door, using concerns about charter schools and homeschooling as fronts. Privatization has rarely worked for the public good, instead benefiting a narrow range of interests that want to tap public money for themselves. One way that those on the far right disguise their intentions is to claim that they want “reform,” which suggests that they want to improve things, though what they really want is to find a way to drain public funds into private pockets. It is clear from our news reporting (thanks again to the ADN) that this backdoor privatization of education is calculated.

As much as the right-wingers would love to direct public money to themselves at the expense of public education, they are confronted with one compelling fact: People love their neighborhood public schools, and they want them not just to survive but to flourish. But a part of the Legislature, and the governor’s office, have proven that they do not want that to happen, using talk of “reform” as a mask.

That is not to say that reform is unnecessary. Public schools are incessantly scrutinized by the public; and people may not realize that self-examination within public education is ongoing. Part of our thinking that distorts the need for reform is the inclination to lump all school districts together, implying that failure is uniform and universal. However, there are vast differences between schools and school districts. South Anchorage High School is not Selawik; Juneau is not Point Lay; West Valley High School in Fairbanks is not Togiak. Reform must be targeted and local.

I think it likely that Coulombe and Kaufman acted in good faith concerning education, and used very bad judgment in the process. Maybe they spent too much time with the extremists in their party, such as Reps. Jamie Allard of Eagle River and Sarah Vance of Homer. In any case, full funding for education should not be controversial, and if someone makes it so, it is because they aim to benefit from the unnecessary complications.

Walter Featherly and Janice Park look like good candidates to me.

Clarence Crawford is a longtime Anchorage resident who plans to live out his years here along with his wife. Their children and grandchildren were born Alaskan and live in Anchorage.

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