A new study commissioned by the Alaska Legislature says that the state's school funding program largely works well for its school districts, and found that an increasing proportion of spending on instruction is tied to better student performance.
The study, conducted by Colorado consulting firm Augenblick, Palaich and Associates, was required by an education package passed by the Legislature in 2014. It was presented Wednesday to a joint House-Senate budget committee in Anchorage.
Lawmakers in the Legislature's Republican-led majorities have been critical or skeptical of the state's school funding program over the past several years, saying it's complicated and broken and favors rural districts over urban ones.
But when the 31 different participating school districts were consulted, "interviewees were generally happy with how the system works," the 143-page report said in its executive summary.
"Further, the system is understandable and transparent to educators," the summary said.
The report did raise some questions about the way Alaska allocates its money among different-sized schools, with some interviewees saying they had concerns that the funding formula could push districts to build smaller, less efficient schools to get higher per-student payments from the state.
The study also said that the state's funding formula may not adequately account for differences among districts in the number of special needs students.
But in large numbers, the report said, "interviewees enjoyed that the formula offered local districts the flexibility to make the financial decisions that would best fit their communities."
It also found that for every $1,000 in additional per student instructional spending, students' state test scores increased by 2 percent in reading and 1 percent in math -- a correlation it described as small, but "still significant."
Rep. Lance Pruitt, R-Anchorage, said in a phone interview Wednesday that he left the consulting firm's presentation of its study with "still a lot of questions." The study, he added, was narrowly focused on documenting the views of school districts and administrators.
"I'm not sure that it asked the right questions, and of the right people," Pruitt said. "I'll have to read more and try to dig into it a little bit."
Pruitt said the study's methodology was established under the joint budget committee during the last legislative session, when it was chaired by Sen. Anna MacKinnon, R-Eagle River.
MacKinnon, now a member of the Republican-led Senate leadership and co-chair of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a phone interview that there was "100 percent consensus" on the request for proposals for the consultant. She said she received a compliment from Rep. Mike Hawker, R-Anchorage, the current committee chair, for the way she conducted the process in 2014.
The purpose of the study, MacKinnon added, was to examine how fairly Alaska's funding formula spreads state money among different school districts across the state.
Asked how she interpreted the study, MacKinnon responded that she still had some "in-depth reading" to do, and said there were "some suggestions that we can look at."
But she also questioned another of the study's findings about the sustainability of the state's education system, which said Alaska should explore income or sales taxes, or both, as its oil-based revenues steeply decline. That's a conversation, MacKinnon said, for which many Alaskans aren't ready.
A staff member for Hawker couldn't immediately provide a total cost for the education study. The maximum set aside for the study was $225,000, according to committee procurement documents.