News and Announcements

This is a list of recent publications and reports by CAEPR and ISER focused on school finance, teacher workforce issues (recruitment, retention, and turnover),and related topics. This represents only a small portion of the education-related products from CAEPR and ISER. All CAEPR/ISER reports are available on the web at Scholarworks@UA, and you can see many of our peer-reviewed journal publications on journal websites or via the UAA/APU Consortium Library.

Increased wildfire activity has raised concerns among communities about how to assess and prepare for this threat. There is a need for wildfire hazard assessment approaches that capture local variability to inform decisions, produce results understood by the public, and are updatable in a timely manner. In this article, Schmidt and her co-authors describe how, in partnership with wildfire practitioners and communities, they created a tool that rapidly assesses wildfire hazards and is easily modified to help identify and prioritize mitigation activities.

ISER is very pleased to be a collaborating partner in this important center at UAA. We will share more about the research initiatives and other activities involving ISER as the details are confirmed, and we look forward to helping advance understandings of security in the Arctic and to supporting the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in their efforts to better respond to challenges in the Arctic domain.

The public is invited to an education policy forum titled: “Funding Education in Alaska: Lessons and Insights from Local and National Research” on February 8, 2024, at 5:00 pm in the Egan Lecture Hall room 112 on the UAS campus in Juneau. This free event, co-sponsored by the UAS School of Education and the UAA Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER), features Dr.

The media frequently report on research by ISER’s faculty and staff or ask for their input on current topics. We began listing these in 2014 to provide a historical record. 

See additional years.

2024

On Thursday, December 7th, ISER hosted a Helen and Edward Gorsuch Public Policy Forum titled "Public Education Funding in Alaska: What we know, what we don't and how other states do it".

The Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) faculty, including Brett Watson, Bob Loeffler, and Mary Kopriva, showcased their expertise as panelists at the Alaska Resource Development Council annual conference held in Anchorage on No

ISER Faculty Member Jennifer Schmidt partnered with Toby Schwoerer at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Jim Powell at the University of Alaska Southeast on a study of threats from climate-related hazards to homeowners in Fairbanks and Anchorage.

ISER Director Diane Hirshberg was the guest speaker at the Anchorage Unitarian Universalist Fellowship Forum on Sunday Nov. 5. Her talk, titled “From Sheldon Jackson to the Fight for Tribal Schools: The Unfinished History of Colonization’s Impact on Alaska’s Schools and Students” covers her learnings from over 20 years of research into education in Alaska.