AKLEG Day 106: 'Deep reservations'
Legislators give Board of Education member Bob Griffin a major thumbs down.
Good morning, Alaska.
In this edition: Board of Education member Bob Griffin faced tough questioning during his confirmation hearing in the Senate on Monday, with several legislators outlining their opposition to the longtime member of the conservative Alaska Policy Forum. Griffin has long advocated for sending more public funds to private and religious schools in the name of school choice, laying the groundwork for the scheme that did just that before it was struck down by an Anchorage Superior Court judge earlier this month.
Current mood: 😎
Correction: Alaska Permanent Fund Trustee Ellie Rubenstein is an Alaska resident. I was thinking about her private equity firm, Manna Tree, which is based Outside.
‘Deep reservations’
The Alaska Legislature is set to meet next week for the joint session to vote on the governor’s appointees, an annual milestone in the closing days of the legislative session that always makes for good, nerdy viewing. One of the marquee fights of this year’s joint session is shaping up to be over the Board of Education, which has happily served as an extension of the Dunleavy administration to implement far-right policies—such as the trans sports ban—that have failed to gain traction with the Legislature. And it’s not just that, but legislators across the spectrum have been unimpressed with their pick to lead the Department of Education, Commissioner Deena Bishop, and even pulled funding for the board’s pet project, the poorly explained Alyeska Reading Institute. But, of course, the elephant in the room is the Superior Court Judge Adolf Zeman’s ruling earlier this month that scrapped much of the state’s home school laws over a scheme that allowed funding meant to help families buy supplies to be used by families with kids in private schools as tuition subsidies or to pay for extracurriculars like horseback-riding lessons.
It was a decade-in-the-making plan that can, in part, be credited to the longtime advocacy of Board of Education member Bob Griffin, one of the three Board of Education members who will be up for confirmation next week.
Griffin, a member of the right-wing Alaska Policy Forum, has long been one of the leading voices in criticizing Alaska’s public school system and advocates for the type of “school choice” that sends public education dollars to private and religious schools. He’s also frequently justified that push with the claim that home school students are doing far better than kids in traditional neighborhood schools, overlooking the fact that fewer than one in five home school students actually take standardized tests. In contrast, a vast majority of neighborhood school kids do.
Griffin has also frequently blurred the line between his personal work with the Alaska Policy Forum and his role on the Board of Education. That included attending a charter school meeting in 2022 to explain how to use allotments as tuition subsidies, where he was recognized as an official from the Department of Education, and legislative presentations, where he passed off Alaska Policy Forum charts as state-approved ones by adding the department’s seal.
The Alaska Policy Forum has been at the forefront of making this push to use allotments as tuition subsidies—essentially school vouchers with a wink and a nod— arguing that spending home school allotments on private school tuition doesn’t violate the Alaska Constitution because, as they claim, it’s the family receiving the benefit and not the schools (Judge Zeman shot this thinking down). It was also Alaska Policy Forum’s board chair, Jodi Taylor (spouse of Attorney General Treg Taylor), who wrote a now-infamous editorial explaining how she was using a home school allotment to cover $4,000 of the $6,000 tuition at a religious private school. The Alaska Policy Forum also kept a list of schools and home-school programs that were the easiest to take advantage of.
With their hand caught in the public school funding cookie jar, Judge Zeman said the laws were so fatally flawed that he had no choice but to strike down broad swaths of the state’s home school laws. It’s left some 22,000 home school students in Alaska—including those who we’d think of as actual home school students following the rules—with no clear answer of what’s next. Both the House and Senate have introduced bills that would restore varying levels of guardrails on the program, but it’s looking unlikely that either will pass before the end of the legislative session.
What’s clear, though, is some legislators aren’t willing to overlook Griffin’s role in creating this mess.
“Hundreds of millions of dollars have gone out of the public funds into private hands during your tenure,” said committee chair Sen. Löki Tobin, D-Anchorage.
At a Monday confirmation hearing in the Senate Education Committee, legislators raked Griffin for everything mentioned above and more. Despite his bumbling and rambling responses filled with hollow gestures toward the public education system, the senators questioned Griffin’s motivation and honesty. Sen. Tobin noted Griffin has also continued to promote a study that claimed Alaska is adequately funding its public schools despite the researchers conceding there are fundamental flaws with how the unique challenges of Alaska are accounted for in the study, with one researcher adding, “I’m definitely saying don’t take it at face value.”
“In my conversations with those researchers, they’ve been so dismayed by the misrepresentation of their data that they are choosing to exclude Alaska going forward,” she said. “It’s just odd to me that you continue to propagate this disinformation.”
Griffin also faced criticism from senators over his efforts to openly lobby legislators to vote against overriding the governor’s veto of the education bill, which failed by a single vote. There’s been talk that those lobbying efforts included explicit threats of well-funded primary challengers against Republicans who didn’t sustain the veto. While some legislators said it walked right up to the line of violating the state ethics act, Griffin saw no problem in it.
“I encouraged them to sustain the veto because I think the governor was correct,” he said, criticizing the bill as lacking educational reforms.
That educational “reform,” however, is the proposal to allow the Board of Education to create state-sanctioned charter schools with little input or oversight from the local school districts that would be charged with operating them. At the hearing, he argued that the current situation gives local school districts too much power.
That also didn’t sit well.
Sen. Tobin noted that Griffin has claimed that people are “voting with their feet” by going from neighborhood schools to charter schools and home school programs, which he has used to justify focusing resources on programs that serve a relatively small and generally better-off group of students. She pointed out that many of the families who have chosen the home-school path have done so because they’re looking for the kind of opportunities and extracurriculars that have been eliminated from neighborhood schools thanks, in part, to the type of anti-public school politics that Griffin has long nurtured.
“We have recent news reports that say folks have been participating in correspondence programs because there’s no longer arts and science and P.E. in their neighborhood schools. This has happened during your five years on the state Board of Education,” she said, adding that the charter school proposal he supports is a direct attack on the local control that has made the system so successful. “I hope you understand that we want folks who care about our public schools, who are advocating for our public schools, who are not talking about reconstituting power in the state board and away from our locally elected school board members. It is very disturbing to me that you think the decision should be made by the state Board of Education and not at the local level with the local communities. …. I have deep reservations.”
In the big picture
It’s hard to say how Griffin’s appointment will play out. Still, it’s worth noting that legislators last year rejected the appointment of Alaska Policy Forum CEO Bethany Marcum to the University of Alaska Board of Regents. Much of the criticism against her is true for Griffin. Her past support of the governor’s veto of UA funding was seen as incompatible with the mission of the Board of Trustees, just as Griffin’s support of the governor’s education bill veto is now. Similarly, legislators also had misgivings about Marcum’s political advocacy, given her controversial role on the Alaska Redistricting Board, which a judge struck down as an unconstitutional attempt to gerrymander in a GOP advantage to the election maps.
Stay tuned.
“Correction: Alaska Permanent Fund Trustee Ellie Rubenstein is an Alaska resident. I was thinking about her private equity firm, Manna Tree, which is based Outside.” Does she qualify for a PFD…?