Transparency is a foremost goal of the Alaska Policy Forum. As citizens, we hold a critical interest in how our tax dollars are used and transparency only serves to better inform our future […]
Mat-Su Borough Employee Salaries and Benefits for 2017
A Shameful Narrative
An offensive narrative has been circulating that Alaska Native children are to blame for our state’s low reading test scores. That narrative is not only extremely divisive and offensive – it is untrue. […]
Unsustainable Spending: The State of Alaska’s Budget and Economy
Alaska Policy Forum is proud to have partnered with economic experts at The Buckeye Institute and its Economic Research Center to release our latest policy paper: a study of Alaska’s budget, economy and […]
Third-Grade Literacy: Alaska’s students must Read by 9
The Problem Statistics for literacy among Alaska’s children are dismal. Alaska’s K-12 education system has arguably the worst student outcomes in the nation in the fundamental task of teaching children to read by […]
Impacts of Ballot Measure 1 on Alaska
The Senate State Affairs Committee held a meeting earlier this summer to learn the impacts to our state if Ballot Measure 1 passes in November. None of the presenters took a position on […]
Alaska Schools Post Disappointing National Test Scores
Alaska saw a significant drop in test scores during the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in 2017. The NAEP is an assessment conducted by US Department of Education every odd-numbered year, […]
412 Anchorage City Employees Cost More than the Mayor in 2017
True to one of our guiding principles that government should be limited and as transparent as possible, we are providing the most recent annual payroll for the Municipality of Anchorage. We believe it […]
Taking Money from Classrooms to Pay Bus Drivers
Every year we hear the same refrain from many school districts, “We need more funding or we will have to fire teachers.” It would seem that Alaska’s funding of more than $20,000 per […]
Alaska options for health care reform and administrative improvements to the Affordable Care Act
By Roger Stark, MD, FACS, Alaska Policy Forum Visiting Scholar and WPC Health Care Policy Analyst Patients are the most important part of the health care system and they should be in charge of […]
Right-Sizing Alaska’s State Government Workforce
A few weeks ago the Alaska Policy Forum highlighted an analysis from Key Policy Data, a national data visualization firm. The analysis found that in 2016 Alaska had the second-least productive state and […]
Alaska’s Budget Deficit: Have we really cut enough?
In a large statewide poll conducted by Hellenthal and Associates in the spring of 2017, Alaskan voters agreed with the following statement by a two-to-one margin: “The state budget needs to be drastically […]
Newly released: Anchorage School District Payroll
The Anchorage teachers union wants a 3% pay raise for its members. Fact: the median salary and benefits for a full time ASD employee is $ 90,506. Benefits account for 32% of this total.