Governor Mike Dunleavy held a meeting on Tuesday to discuss the findings of the Statewide Public Opinion Poll regarding education.
Dunleavy shared with the public that since this poll was using public money, the results of this poll were to be made known to the public. The study cost approximately $37,500.
Dittman Research Owner Matt Larkin opened the presentation by sharing that this was a large sample of 810, but also doing some oversampling in the small communities such as Fairbanks, Southeast, and Western Alaska.
The poll rated Public schools on a sliding A through F scale. 3/4 of Alaskans rated the system as a C and below.
“And this was a question we originally came up with in 2014 when we asked this question for the legislature. We did a project for the majority caucus there in 2014,” says Larkin.” But that is, it has lower scores than where Alaskans scored in the schools ten years ago, so there’s some movement there.”
Further in the poll, it can be determined that Alaskans do strongly support an increase in education funding. They also support a number of reforms to the education system as well.
“But what I wanted to highlight here is, when it comes to the question of increasing student achievement or student performance or outcomes, what is the most important factor? And by a margin of 1.7 to 1, Alaskans would say change in reforms to the systems of the most important factor versus increasing education funding,” said Larkin.
Similarly, in the poll, there was a debate on what approach would best support overall education outcomes. Is it the changes in reforms or the increase in funding?
“And by a margin of 57 to 33, Alaskans said changes in reforms are the most important factor to improve outcomes,” said Larkin.
However, regarding the individual who said that funding increases were the answer, they were provided a second question. If it were necessary to reduce the PFD to supply this funding, would they be in favor of it?
It was determined that the individuals in favor of increasing funding would be willing to put forth their PFD to do so, which makes up, prominently, 23% of Alaskans.
“And then if similar to the previous question at a PFD follow up for those that wanted to to fund to keep all the schools open and what we see here is that less support than the previous question for using the PFD to to keep schools open. Roughly half of those that that said that we should do that, don’t think we should use the PFD for that,” said Larkin.
To end the presentation, Larkin shared a graph of education proposals sorted in descending order, based on agreement.
An increase to base education funding/BSA increase took highest priority, with 77% of Alaskans in favor. Following in second was offering a bonus incentive program to help recruit and retain teachers, which has a 71% of overall support. And providing a corporate business tax credit for donations to be made to public schools had 69% support.
“These are all things that, when you get polling that numbers are this high in agreement, that these things tend to be viewed really just as common sense ideas among the public,” said Larkin.