Little progress on teacher quality in Alaska, group says

Only three states have made less progress toward improving the quality of teachers than Alaska over the past two years. That, an overall "D" grade for teacher quality and an array of troubling claims are described in a recent report by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a group based in the District of Columbia that advocates for reforms it believes will improve the teaching profession.

The report decries everything from the knowledge base required to become a teacher in Alaska to the state's alternative licensing programs to firing practices for poorly performing teachers who have achieved tenure.

"We conduct all the research ourselves," said Sandi Jacobs, who directed the report. "We grade states against our own set of policy goals by looking at what the state policy is and what's being done."

Jacobs said the report is free of partisan and ideological slants, but a few of its claims were met with a variety of criticism from legislators in both parties, teachers union representatives and longtime Alaska educators.

Rep. Scott Kawasaki, D-Fairbanks, a member of the House Education Committee, said one of the problems in the report is that it does not account for how Alaska's geographic and cultural diversity affects state education policy.

"Whenever these state-by-state rankings come out, they often forget that every state is unique," Kawasaki said. "Often, in Alaska, changing standards would mean leaving a school with (a few) teachers with no one at all."

He said that is one of the reasons the state has traditionally allowed school districts to make decisions about hiring, and he also said that a good deal of the state's districts, especially ones in urban districts, already meet much of the criteria called deficient by the report.

"There's still plenty of room for flexibility at the local, district level," Jacobs said in response to critics who claim her group's suggested reforms leave too few decisions to the community.

Senate Majority Leader Kevin Meyer, R-Anchorage, who is chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said he was taken aback by some of the report's claims. He was especially surprised by one of the traits for which the report gave Alaska a nod as a "best practice state," its pension plan for teachers. The National Education Association, the leading teachers union in the United States, has described the state's shift to defined contributions as "the day retirement security died in Alaska" on its website.

Jacobs said she believes Alaska deserves praise for the defined contribution pension plan, which requires individual accounts for each retiree, fluctuates with stock and bond markets and is the ire of unions.

Meyer declined further comment on the report because of what he considered inaccurate information.

Diane Hirshberg, a professor of education policy at the University of Alaska at Anchorage, said she believes a lot of existing programs and standards were missed by the researchers.

Union representatives disagreed with the report's assertion that steps involved in firing are too invasive.

"I've been told it's almost impossible to fire a tenured teacher," Barb Angaiak, president of NEA-Alaska, said. "That isn't true. And people misunderstand statistics, because very often school districts will offer teachers the opportunity to resign instead of firing.

"The system isn't perfect, but it is working very well."