Opinions

OPINION: Despite politics and compromises, Alaska reading bill is a step forward

It’s interesting to watch how major policy accomplishments are made in the Legislature. It’s comforting and disturbing at the same time. Comforting in that the process actually works, disturbing in that things can go sideways at the last minute after years of work.

A good example is the Alaska Reads Act, a new law that will strengthen reading instruction for young children. Alaska is in last place among states in fourth-grade reading skills, and we should be ashamed of that.

However, the Legislature did pass House Bill 114 to start things moving in the other direction. It also added pre-kindergarten, or pre-K, for all public schools in Alaska and that will be paid for by the state. We will be one of a handful of states that offer universal pre-K.

This is important because experience shows that children get ready to learn at age 4, and pre-K gives them a jump-start when they enter kindergarten at age 5.

What’s surprising, but not unusual for those who follow the Legislature, is that the Alaska Reads Act was eight years in the making. That it became controversial at the very end and opposed by many progressive Democrats is an utter mystery to me. More about that in a minute.

Sen. Gary Stevens, R-Kodiak, a retired educator and a veteran legislator, introduced the first version of the reading bill in 2014. It didn’t pass, but it started the conversation about why Alaska children’s reading scores were so low and why other states were solving this problem.

This went on the shelf in 2015 and 2016 as state oil revenues collapsed and the Legislature was preoccupied with keeping the lights on in public buildings, including schools. Revenues slowly recovered and people refocused on early learning in 2018. The state school board urged a more aggressive policy in improving reading and state education Commissioner Michael Johnson, whose tenure has spanned several administrations, started looking at what other states were doing, also taking advantage of federal funds available for reading instruction.

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Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who is also a former educator, supported new reading initiatives even with revenues tight. At the same time, state Sen. Tom Begich, D-Anchorage, who has experience in rural education, introduced a bill expanding state-supported pre-K.

Dunleavy had introduced his version of a reading bill, but withdrew it in 2020 to support Begich’s bill, which by then included the reading component. In the state House, Rep. Chris Tuck, D-Anchorage, was sponsoring similar bills.

Begich, Commissioner Johnson and Dunleavy were working together on this, which irritated some Democrats who felt Begich had sold out to the devil by cooperating with Dunleavy. That was an early signal of the politics to come.

Politics intervened at several points. Conservative groups, who saw a friend in the governor, worked to inject ideas like a “high stakes” reading test for third graders with a “hard,” or required, required retention, meaning they stay in third grade for another year if they don’t pass the test.

That rankled progressives and most educators, because hard retention would take decisions on whether children should advance from third to fourth grade away from parents and teachers, who routinely screen reading skills now, so that the decision depended on a child’s test score.

However, what the Legislature does best is negotiating compromises in the give-and-take among competing views. Over time, even the Republican-led Senate removed high-stakes testing from the bill.

In the version that passed, “screening” is done — screening for reading problems happens now, of course — and parents are advised by teachers if children are having trouble and may not be ready to advance.

Meanwhile, the state House was busy with its version of a reading bill, sponsored by Rep. Chris Tuck, D-Anchorage, and the House Education Committee, led by Reps. Harriet Drummond, D-Anchorage, and Andi Story, D-Juneau. The committee did a huge amount of work on the bill over two years.

Not surprisingly, the House committee wanted other things added important to schools, including an increase in overall education formula funding, which has been frozen and not adjusted for inflation for several years.

As the Legislature rolled into its final month in May, the Senate passed its version of the bill unanimously while the House continued work on its version. In the hectic final days of the session, legislators in the House kept adding things like pension reform and a special division of Indigenous studies. This was a gamble that the Senate would accept the House additions to secure passage of its priority, the reading and pre-K bill.

In the end, the House version of the bill got too loaded down. The reading bill was actually defeated in the education committee, with progressives voting to kill it but Republicans voting for it. That was a really bizarre outcome.

May 18 dawned, the final day of the session. Senate supporters of the reading bill engaged in a tactic that is sometimes used, crude but effective. They inserted the version of the reading bill that had passed the Senate into another bill that had passed the House earlier that also dealt with education.

Procedurally, this allowed the House-passed bill, with its Senate additions, to go back to the House for a simple up-or-down vote on the House floor. All this happened in the hectic final hours before legislators’ required midnight adjournment.

The heated debate that ensued on the floor vote was not the Legislature at its best. Ugly things were said. Progressive Democrats said there wasn’t enough support for Indigenous Alaska Native students despite the fact that the bill contained many provisions supporting Indigenous learning authored in the House by Rep. Tiffany Zulkosky, D-Bethel. In the end, the bill passed by one vote, a razor-thin margin.

Zulkosky voted against the bill in the end, because she said it didn’t go far enough to help Indigenous children.

Others in the House voted no because it didn’t contain other things, like pension reform and enough increased education funding, although there was actually new money for schools in the bill.

In the Legislature, as in life, we can’t get everything we want.

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However, the final ugly debate in the House shouldn’t detract on the significance of this legislation. The law can always be improved — Colorado has amended its early-reading statute eight times — but what’s important is that we’ve established support and money for early childhood education and reading as state policy.

For anyone interesting in growing the state’s future workforce, this is huge.

Tim Bradner is publisher of the Alaska Legislative Digest and Alaska Economic Report.

The views expressed here are the writer’s and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.

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