OPINION: All Alaskans have a role in improving education

How can underfunding schools encourage them to improve? That’s equivalent to telling a child that you won’t feed them until they gain weight. Keeping schools “fed” in Alaska, let alone rural Alaska, is expensive business. And the tests tell us it really isn’t working so well, so it appears the governor and a fair number of legislators find it acceptable to watch without acting as our schools slide off a cliff. Teachers, already underpaid, will leave the profession if you don’t value them. Privatize these schools and see what happens. The wealthy will be at the “best” schools, and a host of other schools, each specializing in their “niche,” tumble to the bottom of the pack with public schools housing the poorest and neediest. Alaska’s small towns and villages, unable to sustain multiple schools or afford private options, will suffer the most.

Democracies and public schools don’t function well when people are hungry and unhealthy. Undereducated people suffering under poverty are overwhelmed and easily swayed by misinformation — or just plain apathy. That’s why our country embraced public schools long ago. It realized a strong, educated middle class would empower this country.

I watched democracies disappear in the two foreign countries I taught in, and the schools played a role in their failures. My students were extremely wealthy but living in very poor countries. The students came from families that valued education -- parents knew that their child’s only path forward was to perform well in the academic realm, and they pushed their kids to the extreme. Tuition, which sometimes took the form of pillowcases full of cash brought into the school office, was 20 times the average yearly earnings in the country. There weren’t behavior issues in these classes, and they often had tutors late into the night. Each student spoke multiple languages. Unfortunately, many of those students were forced to leave their country as adults.

I used the same curriculum as our Alaska schools, and the teachers were trained in the West. The only model for success in those schools was to get the students into Western universities -- the more prestigious the better. Special needs students were conveniently either ignored or pushed out to lower-tiered schools. Individually, the students fared well academically, but they only represented a very small percentage of the country. The rest barely attended schools and were easily swayed by misinformation. Predictably, both countries’ democracies and economies failed, literally in front of me.

It turns out the business of education is complicated, just like parenting. It also turns out that our Alaska system has a long history of doing quite well despite our often dismal test scores. My students in Alaska had all kinds of dreams, from being fishermen, carpenters, mechanics, pilots or electricians, to going to college. And they succeeded.

This argument that our curriculum and teachers are failing or the system isn’t working is flawed. The best schools in the world use the same system and hire our trained teachers. The United States still has the best universities, fed mostly by public school students.

In Alaska, especially small towns, students run the gamut -- from highly educated families that read to their children nightly, travel extensively and make it clear they must perform, to kids from families that can barely feed them and have no concept of how to get their students “ahead.” Public schools in Alaska are extremely diverse and are often crippled by poverty. They are not mainstream, and they don’t respond to mainstream assessments.

The answer is clear: Fund our schools adequately. They’re critical investments. Stop using shallow arguments to gut them. Stop playing around with a system that’s emulated around the world.

Put down your phones, read to your young children nightly, be good models by reading yourself, support quality day care and preschools, and make sure your children know that education -- learning -- is absolutely valued in your family. Good education starts with parents and intelligent voters that understand we’re all connected, and ends with flourishing democracies.

Bob Barnwell was raised in Anchorage. He taught in Unalaska and Seward for 25 years, and another five years in Venezuela and Myanmar. He is retired and lives in Seward.

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