Alex Gimarc: The magical world of JKT – Part 3, Education

By ALEX GIMARC

Oct. 9, 2026 – Today’s stroll through the Magical World of Jonathan Kreiss – Tompkins will focus on his views on education. There is a reason that NEA-Alaska and other education unions all endorsed him. His list of priorities is beyond their wildest dreams. None of them addresses the failed public education system crippling our kid’s future.

We find his platform on his What JKT Stands For page on his campaign website.

There are six bullet points. Five of them demand more money, the sixth is a reasonable request to get cell phones out of the classroom. While that is a Good Thing, why it needs attention of the new governor is anyone’s guess.

– Fully fund our schools and reverse the decline of public education in Alaska.

– Pass a constitutional amendment to “forward fund” education and put an end to the awful annual budget guessing game. School districts and families shouldn’t have to wonder how many teachers are going to be laid off (only to be rehired a month later) on an annual basis.

– Ensure enough funding for Alaska schools to offer sports, electives (shop, music, art, etc.), and extracurriculars that enrich students’ lives.

– Get cell phones out of classrooms.

– Pay teachers fairly. Alaska should attract and retain the best educators in the country.

– Create a defined benefit retirement system that ensures we don’t lose our best teachers to the Lower 48.

The only correlation between education spending and student performance is a negative one. In this state, the more money is spent per student, the worse the outcome, with Railbelt schools providing terrible outcomes and Bush schools worse. More money tends to lock in the awful performance, while expanding the number of non-teachers to ride herd on those in the classrooms.

The only solution to the education disaster in this state is to move control of the money as close to the student as possible. Control of that money closest to the parents gets the best outcome, something demonstrated daily by the homeschoolers, private schools and charter schools, all of which actually graduate educated kiddos.

Keeping this as your overall approach bypasses most, if not all the standard arguments over education, where proponents do their level best to entice critics to argue over how many angels are dancing on the head of the education pin. If something moves control of the money closer to the student, consider it. If it maintains the current disaster, reject it.

And yes, over time, this ends up meaning vouchers or something close to them.

None of JKT’s promises acknowledge the problem of failed public schools, much less pretend to solve it.

He ends his NEA-Alaska wish list by promising to institute a defined benefit pension system for educrats so the schools don’t lose their best teachers. Great, a return to a pension system that is already at least seven billion dollars in the hole taking care of essentially unaccountable, unfireable public employees union members. That’ll work (/sarc). Not.

One of the cute things on his list is a promise to ensure sufficient funding for Alaska public schools to offer sports, electives (shop, music, art) and extracurriculars that enrich students’ lives. This is cute because it pretends to not acknowledge the cynical little game played by school boards and districts during the budget wars, when the very first thing that happens when dollars are tight is firing recently hired, young, popular teachers, closely followed by shutting down sports, band, chorus, and other popular electives.

The other conversation JKT and his union backers refuse to have is how much funding is enough for education? What is the necessary dollar amount? How is it defined? How is that spending controlled? What happens when it is wasted? What happens when we have failing school districts like the ones Bill Hill headed up for a decade? Run him for congress as a Democrat?

Talk about failing upwards.

It is clear that if elected, JKT will not lift a finger to do anything for education in Alaska other than pump increasingly large amounts of money into a broken system. He and his fellow travelers in the legislature will simply throw more money at the problem, hoping for improvement, today’s exercise in wishful thinking, putting the interest of those unions over the future of the kiddos whose lives they are charged with improving for 12 long years in the public schools.

Somewhere along the line, NEA-Alaska and its fellow travelers will once again come after parents who pull their kids out of the failing schools, attempting to make the better performing alternatives illegal, like they tried to do targeting correspondence education in the Alaska courts this year. Sooner or later, they will have a governor, court or legislature to give them what they are demanding, which won’t be an improvement for anyone.

If the courts and legislature are not concerned with educating your kiddos, perhaps we ought to elect a governor who actually is, either that or a potted plant that isn’t actively hostile to successful education of the kiddos. From here, it doesn’t appear that JKT meets that requirement.

Alex Gimarc lives in Anchorage since retiring from the military in 1997. His interests include science and technology, environment, energy, economics, military affairs, fishing and disabilities policies. His weekly column “Interesting Items” is a summary of news stories with substantive Alaska-themed topics. He was a small business owner and Information Technology professional.