Proposed ed funding change deserves better treatment

Nothing has been so detrimental to our state and national dialogues in recent years as single-minded partisanship and the lack of vision that too often accompanies it.

Evidence is abundant that there are too few statesmen anymore, too few elected officials who are not afraid to open their minds wide enough to consider a point of view different from their own, or who are willing to do more listening than talking.

Evidence is equally abundant that we need true statesmen now more than ever.

This is especially the case when a policy change is proposed that is such a departure from the norm that it requires amending the constitution — like the current move in Juneau to overhaul constitutionally mandated education funding.

Those in favor of doing so, like Mat-Su’s own Sen. Mike Dunleavy and Rep. Wes Keller, who sponsored joint resolutions about the issue in their respective legislative chambers, would have us believe this is all about parental choice in education. What it’s really all about, though, is taking limited public money now dedicated to public schools and sharing it with private schools.

It’s an issue that has the potential to touch and profoundly affect all Alaskans. So it is troubling to us that the effort to move the proposal forward is not being done carefully with the attentive consideration it deserves.

On the Senate side, the proposal — Senate Joint Resolution 9 — was yanked from Education Committee consideration by another Mat-Su lawmaker, Senate President Charlie Huggins, who is also a proponent of the measure. Huggins justified it, shabbily, by claiming the proposal is not really about education.

It seems clear, however, that the real reason is more about that committee chair’s unwillingness to simply rubber-stamp the proposal without responsibly vetting it.

On the House side, a different version of the same single-minded shenanigans played out more recently.

In advance of a House Education Committee hearing on the issue Friday morning, committee chair Lynn Gattis, a first-term Mat-Su lawmaker who also supports the education funding change, went out of her way to ensure that there would be public testimony in favor of the proposed constitutional amendment. Rep. Gattis contacted Alaskans for Choice in Education, a special-interest group formed to promote the issue of shifting public money to private schools.

In an email to group supporters, former Anchorage Mayor Tom Fink wrote: “I received a phone call this morning from Lynn Gattis, the chairman of the House Education Committee. She definitely requests that we have testimony at the hearing. … The testimony should be strictly in favor of passing the constitutional amendment …”

Legislators EW elected to represent everyone. So, it is immensely disappointing that Rep. Gattis appears to be uninterested in hearing from all of her constituents about an issue as serious as this.

To his credit, Sen. Dunleavy, in his sponsor statement, does appear to recognize the hugeness of this issue and the deliberation it requires. Even if it passes, he wrote, “the Legislature still needs to have a robust discussion on how to go forward.”

We agree. But we think such robust discussion should begin now.

So we challenge our elected officials to behave more like statesmen and treat this issue with the respect and fair-mindedness it deserves.