Bob Griffin for Anchorage School Board

Privileged To Serve. That’s the motto at the base of the flag pole along the Glenn Highway at Fort Richardson. From my perspective, that pretty much sums up the motivation of a great public servant. During my 20 years as an Air Force fighter pilot and Army attack helicopter pilot, I made a pretty universal observation about my coworkers: the best public servants are not very motivated by money; many of the worst ones are.

The best and most dedicated public employees are the ones who defy the common wisdom of economics and are intrinsically motivated by the love of the job or the cause the work represents. They have a “calling” for public service that transcends their pay and benefits. In Daniel Pink’s research into human motivation, he refers to these types of people as third-drive individuals. With their very basic needs met (first-drive), they have also evolved beyond the second-drive: extrinsic motivation by a cushy life or accumulation of the largest possible quantity of worldly possessions. These third-drive individuals are more motivated by principles and ideals, like the warm satisfaction that comes from serving the greater good.

According to a December 2010 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics news release, the average cost of hourly pay and benefits for public-sector state and local workers in the U.S. was $40.10/hour. That’s about 44% higher than the $27.88 cost of private-sector employees. With a differential this large, individuals motivated strictly by money flood the application process for public service, making it very difficult to pick out people with the desired motivation. A local example of this phenomenon was the 4,000+ applications received by the Anchorage Police Department for their academy class of 36 officers in 2008.

There’s no question we should compensate our good public servants with a fair living wage and decent benefits and reward and recognize top performers. But when public-sector compensation, job security and work rules out-pace their private-sector counterparts by such wide margins, we start to attract the wrong type of people to public service. The worst part is that it only takes a few “bad apple” employees—motivated exclusively by pay and extrinsic benefits—to have devastating effects on our public institutions. Not only are these people likely to be less productive, but even in very small numbers, their lack of earnest concern for the “cause” can take a high toll on the morale and effectiveness of the vast majority of public servants who have chosen to serve for more altruistic reasons.

http://anchorageak.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=2&clip_id=803&meta_id=131678

The Anchorage Education Association asks each school board candidate to voluntarily answer a questionnaire regarding the school district. My responses to this questionnaire are shown below:

1. Please write your name in the box below.
Bob Griffin

2. Have you participated in any of the ASD Budget Meetings or community input opportunities?
Yes, I was an active and vocal member of the Eagle River community budget meeting and I’ve attended a meeting of the ASD budget advisory committee. I have watched all public budget meetings on Channel 14 that I didn’t attend in person. For the record, I was opposed to the choices made by board during the final budget meetings. Their actions will certainly increase the pain of the budget process next year.

3. Do you feel ASD utilizes their funds wisely?
Not always. Resources are poorly allocated by the school board in many areas. One example is the district obsession with facilities. According to Reed Construction Data (the leading firm in the U.S. in estimating the cost of public buildings since 1903), a middle school in Anchorage in 2008 should have cost less than $20 million to construct. This includes union labor, design planning, site preparation, and the cost of local materials. Because of design requirements stipulated by the school board, the new Clark Middle School project cost $65.4 million. Even the new VA hospital completed in Feb 2011 cost $50 per square foot less than the Clark project. I would have favored a more economical approach to the building design that would have left more resources available to fund classroom programs that have a higher probability of success in improving results. The hope was that the extra bells and whistles of Clark would nurture better performance. Unfortunately, after Clark was completed, SBA and TerraNova scores for the Falcons declined compared to scores prior to the building replacement. The Reed Construction Data estimate can be viewed at http://www.reedconstructiondata.com/rsmeans/models/intermediate-school/alaska/anchorage.

4. What changes, either to increase or decrease, would you make to the ASD budget?
Increasing or decreasing the budget isn’t the issue as much as reallocating resources where they will do more good. The size of the budget is determined by what the public will support, regardless of what any individual school board member wants. Any expenditure of scarce public resources must be focused on programs that have measurable effects on improving student outcomes. “Nice to have” programs rob resources from the “must have” programs. Our preoccupation with facilities also robs precious resources from the classrooms. We must seriously look at right-sizing the district, especially in the excess capacity in the mainstream elementary system. Since the late 1990s, elementary enrollment has dropped by more than 2,800 students (mostly from losses to charters and K-5 conversions) and we have added more elementary capacity since then. The trend toward smaller elementary enrollment will probably continue. Excess schools should be used to relieve some of the high demand for charter and alternative programs. I have a pretty good understanding of how difficult redistricting will be, but the school board has already done all of the easy things. Some hard things now need to be accomplished to keep the operation at the high efficiency the public deserves.

5. In your opinion, what factors increase student achievement?
Great teachers have by far the greatest positive impact on student achievement, much more than elaborate buildings and layers of support staff. The innovations available with new and increasingly less expensive technology that can be used to leverage the effectiveness of great teachers is very exciting to me.

6. How do you think Anchorage teachers are performing?
To steal a term from Daniel Pink’s research on human motivation, most Anchorage teachers are “third drive” types of individuals—intrinsically motivated to serve the public good. From my experience visiting 54 ASD schools (so far), the vast majority of Anchorage teachers are great “value added” educators and are doing a fine job. Unfortunately, a very few ineffective teachers or ones that are more extrinsically motivated can seriously undermine the morale and effectiveness of the district and create significant drag on student achievement. My great hope is that the AEA could take the lead in policing its own ranks for underperformers through more aggressive professional standards enforcement, without the need for intervention by the school board. Bad teachers are not only bad for our kids; protecting them is a public relations disaster for the teaching profession.

7. Why are you running for office, and what are your qualifications?
I’ve been very privileged to have served the public as a military leader and pilot for 20 years. The skill sets I acquired during that time will allow me to make a significant contribution as a school board member, if I am lucky enough to be chosen to serve the public again. My family has lived in Alaska since 1899, with the sixth generation of my nieces and nephews attending public school here. When my daughters return to Alaska, I would hope they could raise their children with the available option of a high-quality public education that doesn’t saddle them with an unreasonable tax burden. The future frightens me, with our local property taxes above the 80th percentile of the highest property taxes in the nation according to the Tax Foundation. I’m petrified that our current spending habits will be unsustainable WHEN the Trans-Alaska Pipeline ceases to produce golden eggs in a few years. We must prepare for that inevitability. To do otherwise would be very irresponsible to our children.

8. What do you think the ideal class sizes are for elementary, middle, and high school classes? Would you work to reduce the current class sizes?
The pedagogical data on this subject vary. The majority of studies I have read indicate that class size is critical for early childhood development. On that basis, I will continue to be a strong advocate for kindergarten classes at 20 or less and grades 1-3 below 24. Factoring in SWD, EDS and ELL, those ratios will obviously vary wildly. As for class sizes for upper primary and secondary education, the data are a little more fuzzy, especially when factoring in the application of new teaching techniques supplemented with improved technology. For secondary classes that require frequent writing evaluations, the research of William Ouchi indicates that 80 students per term should be an upper limit. Desynchronized writing evaluations by off-site former teachers is also a good idea to strengthen student writing skills by increasing the frequency of student writing assignments. With 13 students per teacher in the district, it seems pretty obvious that we’ve misallocated many of our very valuable educators.

9. What would you do to make parents more responsible for their children’s education?
I don’t think disengaged parents is a phenomenon that is particularly new or unique to the ASD. That said, I’m very excited about the opportunities to expand communications technology to bring parents more in-the-loop and avoid achievement creep that sometimes happens with students with very good and caring parents. Expanding the capabilities of Zangle (or some better system) to automatically send frequent text messages or emails to parents about their child’s performance will allow earlier parental intervention if student performance is slipping—without adding extra burden on the teachers.

I will also answer questions 10, 12 & 13 below in this block since they are inappropriately in a yes/no format:

Question 10 — Yes. If the bargaining unit sees a defined benefit retirement plan as a priority and negotiates adequate trade-offs to return to a defined benefit, I would not oppose that.

Question 12 — I will support the SRO program on a data-driven basis, not an emotional one. If there are measureable data that student outcomes and safety are improved in any substantial proportion to the $2.6 million cost of the SRO program, I will support it. My feeling is that we can probably achieve many of the good effects of the SRO program by frequent visits from community patrol officers to the schools and by beefing-up existing security staff, without draining resources equivalent to the cost of 10,400 net-book computers per year.

Question 13 — I oppose the practice of leaving critical maintenance needs up to the whims of the voters. Anticipated maintenance, major or otherwise, should be scheduled and budgeted. This will require a change in how Juneau funds maintenance reimbursements.

10. Do you support a return to a Defined Benefit retirement system? Yes/No
Yes (see my response to Question 9 for an expanded answer).

11. Do you think you could pass the HSGQE today? Yes/No
Yes

12. Do you support spending money to have SRO’s (School Resource Officers) in our schools? Yes/No
Yes (see my response to Question 9 for an expanded answer).

13. Do you approve the use of bonds for major renovation projects? Yes/No
Yes (see my response to Question 9 for an expanded answer).

The scientific evidence is clear. Through the spur of competition, school choice programs actually improve student outcomes for government-run public schools. See the link below to learn more.

http://www.edchoice.org/Documents/SchoolChoice/FAQ2-Systemic-Effects.aspx

Clark Middle School: The Case of the Missing $45 Million

The new Clark Middle School was built in 2007-2008 using bonds totaling $65.4 million. According to Reed Construction Data (the leading supplier of data to the North American construction industry, in business since 1903), a middle school built in Anchorage in 2008 should have cost between $18.5-$19.5 million to construct. This estimate includes design development costs, options for six different construction methods, basic site preparation, the cost of using local Anchorage union labor and the cost of building materials shipped to Anchorage.

http://www.reedconstructiondata.com/rsmeans/models/intermediate-school/alaska/anchorage

I was very curious when I discovered this apparent discrepancy in cost, so I asked the Anchorage School District facilities staff for a reasonable explanation of why our actual costs were so much higher than the estimate from Reed. They responded that they were “not sure,” but would “look into it.” Weeks later, the school district referred me to the contractors who had constructed the school for an explanation. Fundamentally, the explanation from the contractors boiled down to the following:

“Design alternatives and owner requirements can greatly affect the total cost.”

Case of the missing $45 million solved. Design alternatives and requirements—established by the Anchorage School Board—made Clark (and many other schools) much more expensive than necessary.

What did we get for our extra $45 million?

One of the school board justifications for the lavish replacement of Clark Middle School was the promise that this infrastructure investment would improve student performance in the economically-depressed neighborhood of Mountain View. What kind of improvement did the taxpayers receive for $65.4 million? The answer is…a drop in test scores. When compared to student test scores the year prior to the demolition of the school (2006/07), test scores in almost every category at Clark have declined since the new school was reopened in 2009.

On the Alaska Standards Based Assessment (SBA), Clark’s reading proficiency dropped from 74% in 2006/07 to 68% in 2009/10. Writing dropped from 59% to 55%. Math proficiency declined from 59% to 56%.

On the nationwide TerraNova test, which rates students compared to national averages, the results were slightly less depressing. Reading scores saw a slight drop, with 34% of the students in 2009/10 testing above the national average in reading compared to 35% percent in 2006/07. Writing dropped two points to 34% from 36%, and math scores improved slightly to 35% in 2009/10 from 34% scoring above national average in 2006/07.

Keep in mind, the TerraNova test scores show that roughly 65% of all Clark students are below the U.S. average in all three subjects. They are below average in a country where the “average” student ranked 30th in the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test scores for math. In that 2009 PISA assessment, the U.S. was ranked behind economic powerhouses like Slovenia, Slovakia, Poland, Estonia, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

It’s pretty clear that the generous taxpayer contributions requested by the Anchorage School Board for the Clark project had little positive effect on student performance. Time and time again, scientific evidence has shown no correlation between lavish schools and the probability of better student results. On the contrary, overly-expensive school buildings rob precious resources from programs that have proven to improve performance and saddle future generations (current students) with mountains of unnecessary debt.

Almost every industry in the U.S. has been able to leverage new technology to become significantly more efficient, effective and productive over the last few decades—with the glaring exception of the education industry. When I retired from the Air Force in 1998, I was flying the F-15E Strike Eagle. Back then, we could deliver a “smart bomb” onto a target, producing target effects with a crew of two that would have required a squadron of B-17 bombers and 180 airmen to produce back in WWII. By leveraging technology, we were able to accomplish the same task with higher accuracy, much less collateral damage and without putting as many friendly airmen in harm’s way. In many ways, classroom instruction for our children looks a lot like it did in the 1940s. In effect, our schools are still flying around in B-17s when F-15s are available.

“Computerizing” the District

For much less than the $24 million cost of extending and maintaining the Service High Theater from its current 200-seat configuration to 700 seats, the Anchorage School District could completely “computerize” the district. The district could provide a computer workstation and a Kindle e-reader for every elementary school student, a portable netbook computer to middle and high school students and replace all the computers and Kindles on a six-year cycle. Again, all of this could be accomplished for less than the cost of building and maintaining a theater in one high school that is only needed seven or eight times per year for performances with an audience over 200.

The Possibilities

A fully-computerized district opens up some amazing possibilities for improving outcomes for students and improving value for the taxpayers. Paper textbooks will become unnecessary, allowing curricula to be updated on a daily basis. With every student working from a computer, lectures immediately become more interactive and engaging. Instead of randomly calling upon students to contribute by answering questions, suddenly every student is answering every question and the computer is carefully cataloging the performance of the students and the effectiveness of the teacher.

Teachers would receive real-time feedback regarding the effectiveness of the lesson and which students need extra attention. Instantly, we would achieve an exponential increase in classroom productivity and early intervention for those students falling behind. This would also provide an objective method of knowing which teachers add the most value to the process.

Parents will also become more engaged with the progress of their student. Real-time text messages and emails of their child’s progress could be available to help coordinate early teacher/parent intervention strategies if the student’s performance is declining.

More Possibilities

Many more classes would be able to shift to a fully-computerized, multimedia-based curriculum. This would allow students to work more at their own pace, opening up opportunities for talented students to learn things beyond the basic objectives of the course, avoiding the boredom of waiting around for less-talented students to achieve the minimum objectives. This also allows the teachers to focus much more individual attention to kids who are struggling.

Even More Possibilities

Suddenly, computer-based education would break down geographic limitations of education through distance learning. No longer do students and teachers need to be in the same room or even the same state. The district could offer classes in Mandarin Chinese or Swahili from a native speaker on another continent. An immigrant student who comes to the district speaking Portuguese with limited English proficiency could be instructed by a teacher off-site without having to hire a less-talented local tutor. Students could participate in family vacations in Hawaii without missing school lessons. Home-schooled children, or children too ill to be physically present in school, could participate in classes.

Desynchronized Learning

Desynchronized learning also becomes another huge opportunity for dramatically improving student outcomes by using technology for tasks that computers don’t do well. For skills like writing that require frequent practice and subjective human evaluation, many secondary school teachers are forced to limit the number of writing assignments because of the large amount of time it takes to subjectively evaluate each writing assignment. Using desynchronous evaluations of writing, teachers could double the number writing assignments by using an off-site, paid network of former teachers to evaluate half of writing assignments online with a 24-hour turnaround time. Students would improve much more rapidly with the additional practice and feedback.

Conclusion

The public education industry continues to be reluctant to embrace technology. Many education labor unions see increases in productivity as a threat and have been instrumental in attempting to block technological innovations. Fortunately, the momentum of the tidal-wave of new technology is too strong for even the most powerful special interests to impede. The increased effectiveness of computer-based instruction will spawn many new cyber-charter schools, super-efficient private schools and improved viability of more widespread homeschooling, causing more families to choose to leave the public school system. The wiser choice for the public education industry would be to embrace the technological education revolution or run the risk of suffering the fate of elevator operators and airline navigators. The leverage of technology will revolutionize education. The possibilities for positive change are limited only by our imaginations.

Under the “Fairness Doctrine” of the Anchorage School Board, taxpayers have been encouraged year after year to fund school facilities that do little to improve student outcomes. By approving unnecessary school buildings, the school board squanders precious public dollars and diverts critical resources away from higher-priority causes. The fairness doctrine is patently unfair to the taxpayers and children who lose out when our public resources are misallocated.

If School X has a certain type of facility, it’s considered unfair to the students of School Y to not have the same facility. There is no district procedure for demonstrating a need for these new facilities or projections of resultant improvements in student performance. They are constructed for no other reason than “fairness.”

The most recent example of the fairness doctrine in action is the proposed Service High School auditorium in the April 2011 bond package from the Anchorage School District. Service High has operated for over 35 years with a 200-seat auditorium and has achieved above-average student performance compared to the rest of the district. A few years ago, East High School received a 700-seat auditorium from the taxpayers. Seven or eight times per year, Service High students use the new East High auditorium for events that require a larger stage or seating area larger than 200. In the name of “fairness,” the taxpayers are being persuaded to make a $24 million initial investment of public funds to build a 700-seat Service High auditorium. With the cost of interest and maintenance included over a 30-year period, this facility will eventually cost the taxpayers over $70 million.

Fairness and cost aside, there is no demonstrated need for another large theater in Anchorage. When Service High was built, the 1800-seat West High auditorium was the main venue for most cultural events. Since then, the government has constructed a plethora of underutilized public venues for the performing arts. These facilities include the following:

Wendy Williamson Auditorium, 910 seats
The Anchorage Museum, 250 seats
Grant Hall, 250 seats

The Performing Arts Center, which includes the following:
Atwood Concert Hall, 2,100 seats
Discovery Theatre, 777 seats
The Sydney Laurence Theatre, 372 seats

There’s also The Wilda Marsten Theater, 250 seats
The Eagan Center with a capacity over 3,000
The Dena’ina Center that can accommodate audiences up to 4,500
The Sullivan Arena with a concert capacity over 6,000

Not to mention the many large churches and other private-sector venues that have been built to accommodate live performances since the 1970s.

For the convenience of not having to go to East High seven times per year for performances, the proposed Service High theater will cost the taxpayers at least $285,000 per performance. If Service High is able to increase its annual performances from seven to 40—that means a performance with an audience of at least 200 people every week of the school year—the cost would be reduced to around $51,000 per performance over 30 years. Worth it?

How could we spend this money more wisely to improve student outcomes? A much better path would be to leverage new technology to improve the effectiveness of the district. In Terry Moe’s book, Liberating Learning, he describes how education productivity has been dramatically improved in many locations around the U.S. by employing cutting-edge computer curricula and distance learning. This includes replacing many of the more mundane and expensive tasks of the education process with computerized systems. These systems promote much higher effectiveness and efficiencies compared to traditional learning processes.

As an example, with $70 million, the school district could install a $500 computer workstation for every one of the 20,000 middle and high school students in the district and replace those workstations every five years, for 30 years, and still have $10 million left over. Which path would have the greater impact on improving student results? A theater in one south Anchorage high school that allows the band and the choir to avoid driving a few miles seven times per year or a computer for every secondary student in the district that could be leveraged to take advantage of new and exciting innovations?

The fairness doctrine represents a stunning failure of our school board to properly prioritize district spending—and it’s unforgivable. Given the choice, I’m sure that Service High parents would gladly trade the convenience of having a large theater at their school for the better education of not only their children, but all of our children in the district.

Here’s a great example of a common occurrence on our school board. On September 14th, 2009, the board pondered whether to spend $228,000 to purchase two single-purpose sand trucks (along with all the future costs of maintaining and staffing the equipment). The trucks would only be used a few times a year to sand school district parking lots and, due to their configuration, could be used for no other purpose. After the brief testimony from Larry Petersen of the Anchorage School District (ASD) Maintenance Department (the only person to give any testimony on the subject), the purchase was about to go to a vote when board member Crystal Kennedy bravely asked, “Did we look into contracting this out?” The short answer is NO. The measure passed unanimously and the district bought two new sand trucks with little regard for any other options.

You can listen to the sand truck discussion below:

School Board Discussion - September 14th, 2009 (2:02)

What would have been the harm in exploring the contracting option and discussing this further during the next board meeting? Maybe the ASD can perform this task more efficiently and less expensively than the private sector, but maybe not. The fact that no one except Crystal Kennedy even spoke up just prior to the vote is telling and pretty disturbing. The fact that we potentially diverted thousands of dollars in resources (i.e., the initial cost of the trucks plus maintenance and staffing) from our children’s classrooms without even exploring other options is unforgivable.

If this were just an isolated incident, it wouldn’t be a big concern, but it’s typical of the decision-making process on our school board month after month. In fact, two similar decisions were made that night with the same 7-0 vote. I invite you to listen to the full recordings of the school board meeting posted on the ASD web site. The sand truck discussion can be heard starting at 0:28:14 in Part 1 of the September 14th, 2009 meeting.

It’s interesting to note that my opponent, Jeannie Mackie, didn’t utter a word during any of these discussions.

Just business as usual on the Anchorage School Board.

The first hero I’ve known in my life was my sister, Dr. Cheryl Benz. A lifelong educator and nationally-recognized scholar, she dedicated her life to the craft of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL).

My next hero is a person I’ve never met, Michelle Rhee, the tough-as-nails Chancellor of the Washington D.C. Public Schools who always puts the kids over the agendas of adults. She made a huge improvement in the lives of many children who were victims of one of the country’s worst school systems.

My next two education heroes are people I’ve just met recently, Sue and Jon Forbes, the principals at Aquarian Charter School and Eagle Academy Charter School in the Anchorage School District. With very few resources, they have created such amazing learning environments that parents are pounding down the doors. Although their budgets are low, outcomes are high, all the while operating on a high-wire with no tenure.

My last hero I’ve known for over 28 years, my wife and partner Chen. Her educational narrative is very compelling. She came to the United States 34 years ago as a teenager escaping the communist regime in Laos and spending more than a year in a refugee camp in Thailand en route. She earned a nursing degree while learning English and working four part-time jobs. Today, she’s a charge nurse in a cardiac ward and a medical interpreter in French, Laotian and Thai. She would have made a great doctor by now if it were not for me dragging her all over the planet for 20 years as a member of the military.

Quality education is more than bricks, mortar and books. It’s the transformation that occurs when teachers nurture and inspire students at an individual level. We have been blessed with the resources to make this transformation easier if we make the commitment to keep our class sizes small and keep the focus on students first.

The explosive growth of more than 1,000 new employees at the Anchorage School District (ASD) since the 2000/2001 school year without an improvement in student outcomes is a bit of a head-scratcher. According to ASD web site figures, since 2000/2001 the student population has decreased by 735 from 49,520 to 48,785 (actually peaking at 50,029 in 2002). With this decline in enrollment, the total number of staff members has risen by 1,010 from 5,371 in 2000/2001 to its current level of 6,381, or 7.6 students for every employee.  Note that the total number of employees includes 557 grant-funded employees (up from 323 in 2000/2001).  These grant-funded employees are not listed in the ASD budget.

Despite this massive increase in resources, the district’s Alaska Standards Based Assessment (SBA) test scores are trending down over the last two years. Our graduation rate is 3% below the national average and we’ve seen a 34% decrease in SAT participation over the last five years. In addition, over 60% of the key performance indicators tracked by the school district were worse than the previous year in the latest Profile of Performance Report.

In contrast, it’s interesting to note that the Anchorage Police Department had 544 staff positions in 2000 and has 545 positions in the current proposed municipal budget. Crime is generally trending down, despite population growth of 18,717 between 2000 and 2008, according to U.S. Census Bureau statistics.

The school district’s recipe of “add money and stir” doesn’t seem to be working very well.  Class sizes in the ASD are too large and have not decreased despite the addition of over 1000 new staff. We have the resources to dramatically improve results without spending more money by redeploying some of our educators out of the bureaucracy and back into the classroom. There are impressive quantities of data that show small class sizes make a big difference in improving student outcomes, especially in the early years of K-3. As an example, data show that smaller class sizes help junior high and high school students as they develop writing skills since teachers can devote more time to each student.

The Anchorage School Board must be held accountable for the debacle that is the ASD. Over the last several years, they have approved every spending and staffing increase proposal that has been placed in front of them with very little evidence of critical thinking. Consider that over the last two years, 100% of proposals put before the school board have been approved, with over 90% of the votes unanimous (7-0).  Is this evidence of effective leadership, or simple rubber-stamping?

I’m very happy to see the Anchorage School District (ASD) finally following up with an analysis comparing our school district to a couple of key districts in the lower 48. This analysis was in response to questions raised by the Municipal Taxpayers League in September, 2009. The ASD’s presentation “Apples to Apples” concludes that the ASD isn’t the “most expensive mediocre urban school district on the west coast.” Apparently, according to the ASD analysis, we tie for that moniker with the very urban school districts of Seattle and San Francisco.

Unfortunately, the ASD analysis failed to address many key points raised by the Taxpayers League that were pertinent to the discussion. The most important missing element in the ASD presentation is that Anchorage does not have an urban school district. We have an urban-suburban hybrid school district, since there are no suburbs that parents can flee to in order to get their children into a better school district. In San Francisco, 54% of the pupils are economically-disadvantaged students (EDS), meaning they qualify for free or reduced lunch, and 28% have limited English proficiency (LEP). In Anchorage, it’s 36% and 12%, respectively.

The closest thing we have to a true urban high school might be Bartlett. With 41% percent of the kids qualifying for free or reduced lunch and 21% with limited English proficiency, Bartlett’s graduation rate is 65%, quite a bit below San Francisco’s 73% graduation rate.

The closest thing we have to a suburban high school might be South, with only 8% EDS and 8% LEP. In comparison, South’s 84% graduation rate doesn’t stand up very well against the Novato Unified School District in Marin County, California. This district posts a 93% graduation rate despite an EDS rate of 26% and LEP rate of 12%. Notably, it spends half what the ASD spends per student.

The ASD shies away from these comparisons for obvious reasons. Over 1,000 new positions have been added to the payroll since the 2000/2001 school year while student enrollment is down. However, class sizes are not any smaller and student results are not any better.

The ASD has evolved into a massive bureaucracy that intercepts critical resources needed in the classrooms and the Anchorage School Board owns the blame for letting this happen. Over the last several years, the school board has rubber-stamped every spending increase put before it by the administration. There has been little evidence of critical thinking or consideration for the taxpayers (at all levels) who have generously contributed to this worthy cause.