In my experience, there’s two types of people who vocally concern themselves with education as a political issue. The first type are people (often former or current educators and concerned parents) who want better education for students, regardless of the shape or delivery method. In this group, you’ll often see a lot of homeschoolers and school choice advocates, who, for one reason or another, are disillusioned with the public school system and decided to take matters into their own hands.

The second type are people who rally for more education spending for public schools, not necessarily for what those public schools can offer children, but because the schools are such an institution, such a cornerstone, in their minds, that to deny them funds for any reason would be tantamount to cultural suicide. These are the “true believers” in education funding, the people you’ll find publicly testifying in committee meetings, driven to histrionics at the thought of Alaska public schools suffering.

Anyhow, I went to the Senate Education Committee meeting on Wednesday, at which the committee heard public testimony about Senate Bill 52, which would increase the Base Student Allocation by $1,000 per student. The bill, intended to alleviate some of the shortcomings of Alaskan schools, would add an estimated $257 million to the budget. Senator Bert Stedman (R – Sitka), co-chair of the Senate Finance Committee, has already said that Governor Mike Dunleavy’s (R – Alaska) proposed $3,800 PFD (would would cost approximately $2.5 billion) should be reduced in order to pay for it, according to the Alaska Beacon.

Public testimony, in any scenario, is always a mixed bag. As proof, I offer you any given Anchorage Assembly meeting. In this instance, however, it only served to illuminate the wide gulf between the aforementioned “two types of people.”

Senators Shelley Hughes (R – Palmer) and Mike Shower (R – Wasilla), who both offered public testimony during the meeting (they don’t sit on any standing committees so this is the only way they can participate in the committee process), argued that any potential new funding needed to be strictly controlled. Hughes said funds needed to be tied to learning accountability measures, and further argued that any new funding (should SB52 pass) needed to be exclusively for classroom instruction – no new administrations or support staff, in other words. Given our frankly abysmal national scores in math and reading, if any new funding does come out of this legislative session, Hughes’ proposal makes sense.

Shower, for his part, argued that our spending is already high, compared to the national average, but our scores are among the lowest. Additionally, he referred to the significantly higher growth in administrative and support services as opposed to actual classroom services, dating back to 2002. Teacher salaries were virtually unaffected. In closing, he argued that if the SB52 money came with some actual demands – performance metrics and increased test scores, for instance – he could live with it, if Alaska got some actual “bang for the buck,” as it were. Throwing money at the school system, as we often do, is not the way to solve the problem – the money must go to the right place, which is the classroom.

There’s no really good way to come out and say this, and I think I’ve done enough to establish myself as kind of an asshole-at-large already, so I’ll say it – the state’s priority, educationally speaking, should not be funding theater programs and competitive jump rope teams (both of which were mentioned in the public testimony, by the way). If there’s money left in the school district’s budget that can be devoted to these things after the main priorities of the district are accomplished, then so much the better.

There were multiple testimonies from members of the public who argued that afterschool activities were as important as actual education for the school system to consider – again, not a necessary function of a school, whose primary purpose is to educate. The growing tendency to outsource the development of a child to the school system is sort of a nefarious trend that deserves its own article.

This is, to a certain degree, what so much of the argument over SB52 (and other school funding bills) hinges on – if we start axing these electives, we’re demonstrating a fundamental lack of faith in Our Children, who are, of course, Our Future. The demands for funding are held up by a superstructure of numbers, but underneath, it’s a multitude of platitudes.

Full disclosure – I am a product of the Anchorage School District. I went to Rilke Schule and graduated from Service High School. I was a debate kid, a German biliterate, I played the violin. Could you tell? Does my public schooling manifest itself in a certain tendency to lean into run-on sentences, a disregard for thesis statements, a general disdain for essay structure and readability, a habit of dragging readers into murky quagmires of dependent and independent clauses from which a point might, eventually, be yanked, kicking and struggling into the light of day?

Whenever someone waxes rhapsodic about the quality educators they experienced at one Anchorage school or another, I reflect on the amount of rot and institutional waste I experienced during my tenure with ASD. To be sure, I had some wonderful teachers, most of whom are now retired, but in my experience, they were the exception that proved the rule.

One final note: the BSA funding, to a certain extent, is also a little disingenuous, unless you know what to look for. That $257 million dollar price tag is not tied to a strict $1,000 dollar increase per student – otherwise, given Alaska’s current K-12 population of about 130,000, it’d be about half the sticker price. Rather, it’s tied to certain multipliers, which classify students in a given area or of a specific demographic as deserving of more funds. For instance, a rural student can count as much as two Anchorage students in terms of the amount of funding they get. A special needs student can count as much as 13 Anchorage students. There’s many more, such as school size, vocational programs, and other conditions that can raise or lower the average cost per student. By these multipliers, which are often incredibly obtuse, the Legislature ends up with a $257 million price tag.

SB52 is not the right step – not without some serious qualifications on where the money goes. If I’m slashing my PFD – which I use to buy guns and ammo and large bottles of brown beer and a new timing belt for my car, as is my goddamned right as an Alaskan – I want to know exactly where that money is going and how it’s going to demonstrably make kids smarter. So far, I’m not convinced. The secret word is “swordfish” (we’re bringing it back).