Every time Alaska’s education bureaucracy finds itself cornered by poor results, it reaches for a familiar escape hatch: “evidence-based.” It’s the talisman that turns spending requests into virtue. Attach it to a report, sprinkle in a few citations from national studies, and legislators will treat it as settled science. The word has become the bureaucratic equivalent of a security blanket – comforting, unquestioned and completely detached from outcomes.

The Evidence-Based Model for Alaska Education Funding by Picus & Associates is the latest exhibit in this long-running illusion. It’s a 100-page justification for doubling the Base Student Allocation from roughly $5,960 to $13,612 per pupil. The document references successful programs in other states – Mississippi’s literacy coaches, Tennessee’s tutoring initiatives, Colorado’s extended learning time – but never demonstrates that Alaska will implement any of them in full. The details end where the spending begins.

Real evidence-based policy has requirements. The programs must be proven effective through rigorous study. They must be implemented exactly as tested. And they must be tied to measurable results. Alaska’s proposal satisfies none of these. It borrows credibility from other people’s work, inflates the budget, and trusts the same bureaucracy that failed under the last 10 “reforms” to suddenly deliver results.

Consultants and union lobbyists thrive on ambiguity because it keeps the funding predictable and the consequences abstract.

Economist Eric Hanushek spent decades analyzing what drives student achievement. His conclusion is blunt: more spending, absent structural change, doesn’t raise performance. Alaska is a case study in his point. Funding has climbed steadily for years while reading and math proficiency have stagnated. The consultants simply repackage this pattern under a new heading, pretending the label itself guarantees success.

The model’s biggest flaw isn’t mathematical – it’s philosophical. It assumes integrity from a system that has never earned it. There’s no enforcement mechanism, no implementation plan, and no performance triggers. The proposal depends on “local flexibility,” which in bureaucratic language means no accountability. Every district will do something different, claim it was “evidence-based,” and call it progress. The result is another round of costly fragmentation disguised as reform.

Look at the contrast with Mississippi. Its 2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act didn’t just cite research, it codified it. Teachers were trained statewide in the science of reading. Reading coaches were evaluated on student progress. Third graders who couldn’t read proficiently were retained until they could. Within six years, Mississippi posted one of the largest NAEP reading gains in the country. It worked because the state demanded measurable fidelity, not because it paid consultants to use the right adjectives.

Alaska could adopt the same discipline tomorrow. Instead, it keeps subsidizing failure under the banner of “evidence.” The Legislature should reclaim that word by tying it to hard conditions. Require districts to submit formal implementation plans for every “evidence-based” program they claim to use. Mandate third-party audits verifying fidelity. Publish district-level outcomes annually. Withhold additional BSA increases from districts that fail to improve proficiency in reading, writing, and math.

That approach would separate genuine reformers from opportunists. It would also end the cycle of legislative amnesia where every new report pretends the last decade never happened. Accountability is the only evidence that matters. If results don’t improve, the spending should stop.

Predictably, this will face resistance. Accountability threatens the bureaucracy’s business model. Consultants and union lobbyists thrive on ambiguity because it keeps the funding predictable and the consequences abstract. But the moral cost of inaction is staggering. Every year Alaska graduates another class of students who cannot read or compute at a functional level, despite some of the highest per-pupil spending in the country. We are purchasing credentials, not competence.

“Evidence-based” has become the state’s favorite euphemism for inertia. Real evidence is what happens when the spending ends and the testing begins. Until Alaska ties its dollars to outcomes, the phrase will remain a bureaucratic lullaby sung over a sleeping school system.

The views expressed here are those of the author.

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