Anchorage Daily News

The Legislature has one day left to finish work on "energy relief." Alaskans will be lucky if lawmakers adjourn without wasting too much money on cash handouts or creating new costly and wasteful energy subsidy programs.

In a rational world, the Legislature would craft a comprehensive energy aid package that follows economically sound guidelines:

• Some people need more help than others. Those with low incomes and high energy costs deserve more help than wealthy people or those who have affordable natural gas and electricity, as in Southcentral.

• This is an adults-only problem. Children will get aid through their parents or guardians. It's expensive and irresponsible to hand children their own "energy relief" payment or "resource rebate."

• Don't subsidize energy prices directly, because it sends the wrong signal to customers. It tells them: "Hey, the more energy you use, the more money you get from the state." A subsidy masks the essential message delivered by high energy prices: "This commodity is expensive to produce and deliver to you. Use less if you can." Price subsidies are costly because they encourage people to behave in ways that net them more and more government aid.

• Subsidies are hard to kill because people get used to them. Better to give people a one-time cash payment toward their energy bills. Better still: Add more money to existing programs that target aid to Alaskans who most need help with energy bills. Examples: the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program and the Power Cost Equalization program. The latter helps reduce rural residents' electricity costs from astronomical levels to the merely painful.

• Cash aid and energy subsidies provide welcome aid immediately, but they are poor long-term energy policy.

Better to invest today's one-time oil windfalls in measures that produce energy cost savings for years into the future. Examples: home weatherization; more efficient appliances and lighting; more fuel-efficient vehicles; wind energy projects; hydroelectric dams; more efficient gas or diesel electrical generation systems, including those that capture waste heat.

But with time running out on the special session, lawmakers have too many different opinions about what to do. As a result, they are patching together a grab-bag of programs and spending items that will let them go home and tell their voters they "did something" about high energy costs.

May that "something" carry a modest cost and steer clear of expensive and wasteful new energy subsidies.

BOTTOM LINE: The Legislature might not make a mess of the energy aid package -- but don't count on it.

Teachers

State worsens shortage with burdensome requirements

In 2005, the state decided to require new teachers to send two videotapes or DVDs of themselves conducting lessons, along with a bunch of paperwork, in order to get permanent teaching certificates.

As some predicted, the rule has proved burdensome. Many teachers haven't done it -- enough so that now the state Department of Education proposes to abandon the requirement.

That's a good idea.

Not that teacher quality isn't important. But having graders in Juneau decide whether a teacher in Anchorage or Anakutvuk Pass deserves a full-fledged teaching certificate was never a smart plan.

Most districts have principals and superintendents qualified to decide for themselves whether a teacher makes the grade. They don't need intervention from Juneau.

Supervisors in the field have the advantage of being in classrooms day after day; of knowing the kinds of students the teachers are trying to reach; and of being able to offer help to a teacher who needs improvement on particular skills.

For those districts that do a bad job with teacher evaluation, poor student test scores will reveal the failure.

The state should focus on the districts that need help, instead of putting all first and second-year teachers through a formidable, some say demeaning, exercise that takes away from teaching.

Anchorage Superintendent Carol Comeau has opposed the DVD requirement from the beginning.

"It is truly affecting our ability to recruit and retain some really high quality teachers," Comeau said.

Some teachers just refuse to do it, and leave for another state where they don't have a video requirement, said Comeau.

Alaska suffers a terrible problem with teachers leaving as it is, with 22 percent turnover in rural Alaska last year. This demeaning level of review by bureaucrats far from the classroom is just another irritation that pushes new teachers out the door.

Of 268 Alaska teachers who would need to complete the requirement by the end of the upcoming school year, only 41 have progressed far enough through the state system to maintain their beginner-teacher certificates, the state Department of Education reported recently.

And only 13 have completed requirements to move from the initial, temporary teaching certificate to a permanent one.

That leaves 227 teachers who could lose certification.

There's no guarantee these teachers would be replaced by better ones. But their leaving will cause more disruption in the teaching ranks -- and the more disruption among teachers, the worse education gets for Alaska's kids.

BOTTOM LINE: State reviews based on taped performances are not a good way to evaluate new Alaska teachers.

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