For years, Alaska’s education establishment has perfected the art of crying poverty while sitting atop one of the most bloated bureaucratic structures in the country. The chorus is always the same – “we need more funding” – but the song never changes: bigger budgets, fatter administration, and stagnant outcomes. It’s time to end the performance. Alaska doesn’t need more money. It needs fewer middle managers.

The state’s K–12 system serves roughly 129,000 students across 54 separate school districts. That’s one district for about every 2,400 students. Each district maintains its own superintendent, HR office, payroll department, business manager, and IT staff. This structure may have made sense 50 years ago, when communications were primitive and travel was slow, but in 2025 it’s little more than a monument to redundancy. We are funding an empire of administrators who educate no one.

The problem is most visible in rural Alaska, where many Bush districts enroll only a few hundred students but still operate as fully autonomous bureaucracies. Each has a superintendent earning between $140,000 and $200,000 a year, surrounded by layers of support staff who collectively cost more than the entire teaching budget of some small schools. The logic used to justify this waste is that “small schools have higher costs.” Of course they do – because the system insists on running dozens of mini-districts instead of consolidating them into regional units with shared leadership and infrastructure.

Every superintendent presides over a small kingdom, complete with a school board beholden to them. Merging those kingdoms would require the crown to step down.

If the Legislature had the courage to consolidate Alaska’s smallest districts, it could redirect millions toward instruction. Administrative costs in districts like Lower Kuskokwim, Kashunamiut, and Lower Yukon routinely exceed 25% of total expenditures, compared to less than 10% in larger urban systems. A single consolidated regional district could retain local schools, local teachers and local cultural programming, while trimming the duplicated overhead that eats through state appropriations. Instead, we continue to subsidize inefficiency under the pretense of equity.

Urban teachers often shoulder far greater instructional burdens than their rural counterparts. They face classrooms packed with English language learners, special education caseloads that dwarf rural numbers, chronic absenteeism and daily behavioral challenges. Rural teachers may wear multiple hats, teaching combined grades, but they also teach fewer students and face fewer social complexities. Yet Alaska’s funding formula awards rural districts more money per student than urban ones. This inversion of logic has persisted so long that few even question it.

The Picus “evidence-based” model doubles down on this distortion. It inflates Alaska’s Base Student Allocation (BSA) from roughly $5,960 to $13,612 per pupil, citing small-school “cost adjustments” and “geographic challenges.” Those terms sound technical, but they conceal an old truth: the smallest districts are the least efficient, and rather than reforming them, the state rewards the inefficiency. Rural students deserve quality teachers and materials, not endless layers of administrators who spend their careers talking about student success instead of producing it.

It’s time to separate what’s rural from what’s redundant. Alaska can maintain rural schools while cutting rural bureaucracy. Consolidation would not close schools – it would merge payroll, finance, purchasing and executive management under unified regional systems. Teachers and principals would stay. The six-figure district administrators duplicating each other’s work would not.

The state’s education bureaucracy also hides inefficiency behind a moral shield. It portrays every demand for fiscal discipline as an attack on rural children or teachers.

The predictable pushback comes from unions and superintendents who benefit from the current structure. They warn that consolidation threatens “local control,” though in reality most local boards are powerless under state mandates. What they mean by local control is their control. Every superintendent presides over a small kingdom, complete with a school board beholden to them. Merging those kingdoms would require the crown to step down. That – not student welfare – is what the resistance is about.

Consolidation is not a theoretical experiment – it’s what fiscally sane states have already done. Maine and Vermont consolidated dozens of small districts in the last decade, saving millions in overhead without closing local schools. North Dakota reduced redundant district offices through shared-service agreements. Alaska could do the same, but it would require courage – a rare commodity in a Capitol where “education” is the safest word to hide behind a budget increase.

The state’s education bureaucracy also hides inefficiency behind a moral shield. It portrays every demand for fiscal discipline as an attack on rural children or teachers. That’s false. The real attack on rural education is the current structure that diverts dollars from classrooms to administrators’ offices. Every dollar spent on duplicative district offices is a dollar not spent on textbooks, structured literacy training or student tutoring. Cutting waste isn’t cruelty – it’s stewardship.

If Alaska consolidated its smallest districts into regional systems, streamlined administrative functions and imposed outcome-based budgeting, it could raise teacher pay, fund legitimate literacy initiatives and still save money. But the will to reform doesn’t exist because those making decisions benefit from dysfunction. Legislators listen to the loudest lobbyists, not the quiet taxpayers footing the bill.

There’s a word for a system that rewards inefficiency and punishes accountability: bureaucracy. Alaska’s education system is not failing because of geography or funding levels; it’s failing because of design. We’ve built an infrastructure optimized for sustaining itself, not for educating children. The answer isn’t more money – it’s less waste, fewer titles, and accountability for every dollar.

Until Alaska has the courage to shrink its bureaucratic footprint, every new “funding crisis” will be self-inflicted. The solution isn’t to raise the ceiling; it’s to clean the house.

The views expressed here are those of the author.

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