Audio: Bernadette Wilson’s Public Education Rhetoric
If Bernadette Wilson wants to run on Lower 48 culture wars from 2020, she’s welcome to do so, but Alaska's schools and educators are operating on a starvation diet.
With public education being all of the things right now, you'd think that gubernatorial candidate Bernadette Wilson would have fleshed out a public education policy that didn't read as though she pulled her talking points straight from Mike Dunleavy's playbook for dismantling the whole damn system.
In recent comments made on the campaign trail, Wilson, who is polling second in the race for Alaska governor 😱, spoke to a select group of voters and dismissed the Base Student Allocation as an "arbitrary" number, all while loudly complaining that Alaska ranks at the bottom of national math and reading test scores.
Yes, she said that. Out loud.
In her comments, Wilson conveniently ignores more than a decade of Republican-led flat-funding - not adjusted to account for inflation - that have left schools crumbling and struggling to keep the lights on.
You might have missed it in the audio, but Wilson reached deep into the right-wing playbook for a cheap applause line, claiming BSA funding figures are "literally as arbitrary as Fauci's six-foot distancing rule." Conflating school district budgets with pandemic grievances is an intentional choice, and proves she isn't interested in having a serious policy debate. Instead, Wilson opts to weaponize a tired conservative dog whistle to distract from the reality that her "platform" would continue to leave schools underfunded and press districts to squeeze even more kids into already bursting classrooms.
Wilson also fails to comprehend that you cannot freeze a school district's primary revenue stream while inflation devours its purchasing power. Feigning shock when performance metrics slip after years of systematic financial starvation is the height of hypocrisy if only because the "decline" she complains about is the direct result of policies championed by her own Republican political allies.
MAGA Republican Mike Dunleavy owns the public education crisis. He has spent three terms as governor actively dismantling public schools through a deliberate policy of obfuscation and underfunding. He repeatedly vetoes bipartisan education funding bills and made unprecedented line-item vetoes directly to the statutory BSA formula to block critically needed increases. Meanwhile, Wilson complains about student test scores - ignoring the fact that kids and educators have been collateral damage in Dunleavy's war against Alaska's schools for many, many years.
As former Anchorage School Board member Andy Holleman so succinctly put it in a recent comment on my Facebook page:
"Cuts to education hit particularly hard here, in part because our communities lack a lot of what exists in other states. Consider the abundance (or lack of) quality day care, museums, public events centered on kids, affordable camps and other things.For so many Alaskan kids, school is food and clean bathrooms and structure they don't see anywhere else."
You can take to the bank that Wilson will continue to starve our schools should she rise to the throne.
I'm probably preaching to to the choir here, but when Wilson calls the BSA "arbitrary," she is ignoring the process and basic arithmetic. School boards and administrators do not simply pull numbers out of thin air. They use detailed calculations to determine exactly what it costs to keep the lights on and retain educators, who by the way, are exiting the profession at a disturbing rate.
If you listened to the audio clip, you know that Wilson is low-key suggesting a jump into the top 10 or top 25 states before she will support any school funding increase. This is what we call rigging the game. No educator or principal can magically produce top tier results while operating on a budget gutted by inflation, legislative inaction, and a governor who vetoes funding in an amount that simply seeks to keep the lights on. Setting an impossible bar gives Wilson permanent political cover to veto school funding while pretending to look out for your tax dollars.
This is the MAGA playbook - intentionally starve the system to justify their push for charter schools and to use public money to fund private and religious schools in direct violation of our state's Constitution.
Standing back and standing by as schools are starved to death and then pointing fingers at the wreckage is, as I say, very grotesque.
Oh, and one more thing. In the audio, Wilson falsely claims that school officials are running around, clamoring to build more schools at a time when school districts are literally clamoring to close schools, including three in the Mat-Su school district. 🥴
