Few subjects can shut down a budget discussion faster than feeding kids. It’s the rhetorical trump card of education politics – invoke “hungry children,” and any criticism of fiscal waste is branded cruel. But compassion isn’t the same thing as accountability, and Alaska’s education bureaucracy has blurred that line for far too long. The state’s proposed “evidence-based” funding model uses poverty as a revenue multiplier, assigning a 25% funding bonus for every student qualifying for Free and Reduced Lunch (FRL). On paper, it sounds humane. In reality, it’s financial duplication dressed as virtue.

Here’s the problem: the federal government already covers these costs. Under the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National School Lunch Program (NSLP), schools receive full reimbursement for meals provided to low-income students. That reimbursement is designed to offset the cost of food, staff, and operations associated with feeding students who qualify. Yet the proposed state model acts as though those dollars don’t exist – awarding an additional quarter-weight per student in the state formula, as if the federal reimbursement never happened. It’s double payment for the same expense.

This is the same bureaucratic sleight of hand we’ve seen for decades: hide a funding expansion behind moral language, then dare anyone to question it.

That “weight” isn’t small change. At the proposed BSA increase to roughly $13,612 per pupil (Picus & Associates, 2025), a 25% FRL add-on equates to an extra $3,400 per eligible student – on top of federal reimbursement. In Anchorage alone, where roughly 40% of students qualify for FRL, that amounts to tens of millions of additional dollars annually with no defined educational use. None of it is required to be spent on instruction, tutoring, or core academics. It just becomes more discretionary revenue for districts that already have trouble explaining where the last billion went.

If Alaska’s education leaders genuinely want to help low-income students, they should prove that this extra money translates into better outcomes. Where are the literacy gains tied to FRL weighting? Where are the math proficiency jumps? Where’s the correlation between these equity-based weights and anything resembling academic recovery? The data are silent because no one is measuring it. The FRL weight isn’t evidence-based; it’s politically convenient.

This is the same bureaucratic sleight of hand we’ve seen for decades: hide a funding expansion behind moral language, then dare anyone to question it. But compassion without accountability is just another subsidy for mediocrity. Alaska can support low-income students without inflating the state formula or ignoring federal reimbursements. The USDA already pays for the meals. The state should focus on what Washington doesn’t fund – reading, writing, math and history.

Poverty funding should be temporary, targeted and transparent – not an annuity for bureaucracies that long ago stopped delivering results.

A genuine reform would do three things. First, remove the FRL weight entirely from the Base Student Allocation or adjust it downward to reflect net state cost after USDA reimbursement. Second, require districts to report how all FRL-designated funds are spent, with public documentation of measurable academic impact. Third, redirect any savings into direct instructional support – particularly structured literacy and math remediation programs that actually move the needle.

The “equity” argument collapses under scrutiny. Districts claim the FRL weight helps fund wraparound services and social supports, but those are already subsidized by federal grants like Title I and the Community Eligibility Provision. In practice, FRL-weighted state dollars rarely trickle down to instruction. They disappear into general operating budgets – absorbed by administrative salaries, travel, or “consultant alignment workshops.” Meanwhile, test scores remain flat, and the children these programs claim to help keep falling further behind.

Contrast that with Florida and Texas, where school funding is increasingly tied to student performance metrics rather than demographic labels. Florida’s “Reading Scholarship” program directs funds to families for private tutoring when students fail proficiency benchmarks. Texas’s accelerated instruction funding is contingent on actual academic growth, not eligibility categories. Alaska could adopt similar models tomorrow – linking support to verified outcomes instead of permanent status labels.

If Alaska wants to prove it cares about its poorest students, it must stop using them as justification for budget inflation. Poverty funding should be temporary, targeted and transparent – not an annuity for bureaucracies that long ago stopped delivering results. Every dollar that bypasses classrooms is a moral failure disguised as compassion. The measure of a program isn’t how it sounds – it’s whether it works.

FRL weighting also distorts the broader funding formula by exaggerating district “need.” Because the model stacks FRL, ELL, and small-school weights, high-poverty districts can receive double or triple the per-student funding of mid-size districts without proving superior results. This creates a perverse incentive to maintain poverty classifications rather than improve them. It’s the bureaucratic version of a welfare trap: progress costs funding, and dependency pays.

Legislators should take a hard look at whether Alaska’s definition of “evidence-based” still means what it used to. If FRL weighting is truly evidence-based, show the evidence. Prove that low-income students in Alaska outperform peers when their districts receive these funds. Demonstrate causation, not correlation. If the proof doesn’t exist – and it doesn’t – then the label is fraudulent.

Feeding kids is non-negotiable. Mislabeling financial redundancy as educational necessity is not. Alaska’s taxpayers have the right to demand a clean ledger and a clear conscience. The USDA feeds students. The state should be feeding minds.

The views expressed here are those of the author.

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