When Institutions Become Their Own Worst Enemy

Across Alaska, public education is losing students in traditional brick-and-mortar schools while correspondence programs continue to grow. At the same time, many parents remain angry about how long schools stayed closed during COVID and how disconnected they felt from decisions affecting their children.

That isn’t a contradiction. It’s a warning.

Enrollment doesn’t collapse overnight. It erodes when trust breaks. And we need to be honest about something uncomfortable: as education institutions—including unions—we have played a role in breaking that trust.

In public education, funding follows students. When families leave neighborhood schools, funding leaves with them. That is not ideology; it is how the system works.

What is less discussed is how quickly enrollment loss becomes a downward spiral. Fewer students mean fewer dollars. Fewer dollars mean fewer positions, reduced programs, and less stability. And as positions disappear, union membership declines as well.

When membership declines, leverage declines. Administrations feel it. Legislators sense it. And bargaining outcomes reflect it.

The pandemic exposed long-standing problems. Decisions about closures, remote learning, and reopening were often centralized, poorly explained, and dismissive of parental concerns. Many families felt powerless in a system that spoke at them rather than with them.

That frustration didn’t disappear when schools reopened. It hardened into skepticism.

For many parents, correspondence schools became an exit ramp—not because they hate teachers, but because they no longer trusted institutions to respect their role in their children’s education.

School choice, whether we agree with it or not, is feedback. Families vote with their feet when they believe they’ve lost a voice.

Where We Have to Look in the Mirror
Here is the hard part—especially for those of us in union leadership.

Instead of responding to declining trust with humility and focus, education institutions often doubled down on political activism far outside the core mission of teaching and learning. Unions increasingly positioned themselves not just as labor organizations, but as ideological actors speaking for families rather than listening to them.

For many parents, that confirmed their worst fears: that public education had become politicized, unaccountable, and dismissive of dissenting views.

Once that perception takes hold, it doesn’t matter how fair it feels internally. Trust collapses externally—and enrollment follows.

The enemies of public education did not invent correspondence schools. They didn’t force families to leave neighborhood classrooms. And they didn’t have to persuade the public that institutions were out of touch.

We did that ourselves.

Every time our institutions confuse activism with representation, certainty with leadership, or ideology with accountability, we hand our critics exactly what they need. They don’t have to attack public education. They just point—and watch families walk away.

And as funding drains from brick-and-mortar schools, those same critics celebrate. Because correspondence growth weakens traditional schools, fragments communities, and makes collective bargaining harder.

They love that we keep supplying the ammunition.

This isn’t about whether individual educators should care about social issues. Of course they do. Members can and should advocate as individuals.

But institutions are different. Institutions survive on trust. And trust depends on restraint.
A union’s job is not to parent children or dictate values. It is to negotiate strong contracts, defend due process, protect working conditions, and hold administrations accountable. When unions drift from that mission, they don’t become more powerful—they become easier to ignore.

This is not a debate about values. It is a debate about sustainability.

Focus Is Not Silence—It Is Survival

There is a dangerous myth that narrowing institutional focus is a form of retreat. It isn’t. It is how credibility is rebuilt.

Winning strong contracts is advocacy.

Defending due process is advocacy.

Standing up to arbitrary administrators is advocacy.

Those actions require public confidence and broad member support. Neither survives prolonged mission creep.

A union is not a political movement. It is a labor organization. And labor organizations exist to protect their members.

Rebuilding Trust Is the Only Way Forward and if public education is going to recover, brick-and-mortar schools must regain the trust of families. That will not happen through louder messaging or expanded agendas. It will happen through humility, transparency, and a renewed respect for parental voice.

Strong schools require trust.

Strong unions require members.
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And neither can survive if we continue doing our opponents’ work for them.
If we want to stop the bleeding, we have to stop handing them the knife.

Rick Morgan
President, Mat-Su Classified Employees Association
NEA-Alaska ESP At-Large Director