Student desks in an elementary school classroom at Harborview Elementary School in Juneau on Aug. 15, 2025 (Photo by Corinne Smith)
Recently, the State Board of Education heard a report about teacher turnover in the state. Unsurprisingly, rates of turnover have increased since the pandemic. The authors of the report plan to conduct a survey to determine why teachers leave. I’ll save them some time. If you were treated in your job the way teachers are in theirs, you’d leave too.
As in any job, teachers want to be successful. They want their students to learn and grow as human beings. Yet the conditions in our schools make that impossible. Every year, class sizes grow. Every year new requirements are added and resources are taken away. If you were in a job that became more difficult every year with less and less chance of success, would you stay?
Teachers must hold degrees in education. Teachers must pass national exams. They are vetted by the state for certification. Yet teachers aren’t respected as professionals. The current push for school choice and parental rights combined with the proliferation of low accountability education options like correspondence schools send a clear message to career educators: Anyone can do your job. Your expertise and professional opinions don’t matter. Our governor has made this message part of his educational policies by continuously attacking teachers’ organizations and unions in a way he has not attempted with other professions like electricians or equipment operators. Yet when educators express funding concerns, the governor portrays them as special interests and implies they are an obstacle to student success rather than the instrument of success. If you were in a career where you were attacked and belittled every year by parents, lawmakers and our governor why would you stay?
Finally, teachers aren’t compensated adequately. Alaska used to pay teachers 170% of the national average and offer an excellent defined benefit retirement package. Today that number is 110%, which barely adjusts for the cost of living in our state — facts our governor tried to suppress. Without a defined benefit package, today’s retirement packages offer no incentive to stay in Alaska or in education.
I spent more than twenty years in Alaska schools as both a teacher and principal. There is only one thing I would do differently. I would never encourage students to pursue education as a career. Working with kids is incredibly rewarding, but the conditions educators face are unbearable. No one should spend their career being underpaid, underappreciated and under constant pressure to do the impossible. Nothing about this is confusing — except why lawmakers haven’t been able to fix it.
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