Teacher retention: Fact or fake news?

By DAVID BOYLE

The Education Industry has overwhelmed the Alaska Legislature with its opinion on the teacher shortage in Alaska. Is this a true shortage or is it just a means to demand more money from the legislature for K12 education?

During the past few weeks, the Education Industry, which includes the many school districts, the teachers’ unions, the Alaska Association of School Boards, the Alaska Association of School Administrators, the Alaska Association of School Principals, and the Alaska Association of School Business Officials, have pushed their opinion that they need more funding to recruit and retain teachers. 

Lisa Parady, CEO of the Alaska Council of School Administrators, said, “We can’t recruit teachers, we are struggling in the worst crisis Alaska has seen in terms of turnover. Fundamentally, that’s very important to high-quality instruction.” 

Parady and her fellow administrators from various school districts repeatedly stated the only solution for this “crisis” was more funding.

The live presentation to the joint House/Senate Education Committees is here.

But is this really new? There have been teacher recruiting and retention problems in rural Alaska schools for many decades.  

Many young teachers are recruited from Outside Alaska to fill jobs in our rural schools. They come north, yearning for the “Alaska experience.”

Once they are on the job for a while, they become disillusioned with the harsh climate, isolation, lack of entertainment, inadequate housing, and cultural differences.

This rural teacher problem has been very well documented in “It’s more than just dollars: Problematizing salary as the sole mechanism for recruiting and retaining teachers in rural Alaska” by the Center for Alaska Education Policy and Research. This 2016 study was contracted by the Alaska State Department of Administration.

The study’s conclusion is that “salaries alone will not ensure a stable and qualified teacher workforce.”  Most importantly, are working conditions.

In urban Alaska teacher recruiting and retention is not such a great problem. The Anchorage School District is representative of the urban school districts.

The ASD student population comprises a very large part of the entire State’s student population. The ASD has 42,431 K-12 students this school year; the entire state has 127,931 K12 students. Thus, the ASD has about 33% of the state’s entire student population.

Let’s look at the Anchorage School District’s teacher manning to determine the scope of the problem.

Parady told the House Education Committee, “We can’t recruit teachers.”

Yet, that does not seem to be a problem in Anchorage.

Here are the data for the number of certificated teachers in both elementary and secondary schools and the number of vacancies:

As one can see, there are only 21 vacant elementary and secondary teacher positions in Anchorage — a 1.2% vacancy rate.

Apparently, the district is not having any problems with teacher retention and recruitment.  

Maybe that’s because the district just gave the teachers’ union members a 3% pay raise, which Superintendent Jarrett Bryantt described as, “putting forward the largest single-year wage and health benefits increase provided to educators in more than a decade”.

And that raise just may be the reason that the Anchorage School District needs to increase the Base Student Allocation.  It needs the extra funding to pay for these raises, for which it doesn’t have the money, and to offset the one-time federal Covid money it used to pay for recurring costs such as salaries.

The Special Service Teachers category above includes the special education teachers. There has historically been a shortage of these qualified teachers nationwide. Alaska isn’t the only place with this shortage.

The teacher retention situation in Anchorage may be mirrored in the other four large urban school districts in Alaska.  

To solve the teacher retention/hiring “problem,” the Education Industry wants to put another $1,413 into the base student allocation, increasing state funding of K-12 by a whopping $287.76 million.

This BSA funding, however, would not require any accountability for spending the increased funding in the actual classroom.  

The extra funding could be used to pay administrators’ salaries. It could be used to pay the teachers’ union more money for health insurance. It could be used to hire more Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion personnel.  

Gov. Mike Dunleavy, on the other hand, wants to target the spending to the classroom so it would have an impact on student outcomes. His House Bill 106 would target teacher retention and hiring by paying teacher bonuses.

These bonuses would consist of 3 tiers: $5,000, $10,000, and $15,000. The total cost would be approximately $60 million.

Should legislators support the more than $287 million given to the school districts to do whatever they want with it?  

That $287 million represents 218,750 Permanent Fund dividends (using the 2023 PFD of $1,312).

Or should legislators support the $60 million targeted at teachers actually doing the hard work of educating our students?

This is about accountability for results in the classroom.  

Will $287 million increase student reading scores from a mediocre 29.46% reading for all grades statewide?

 Will $287 million increase student math scores from a dismal 22.8% for math for all grades statewide?