Alaska Progress Report

Alaska ranked 39th for high school graduation rate

A new report from America's Promise Alliance titled Building a Grad Nation shows Alaska has a lot of room to improve when it comes to high school graduation and dropout rates. The national high school graduation rate improved from 72.6% in 2002 to 75.5% in 2009. Alaska improved from 65.9% to 72.6%, one of the better improvement rates in that period. However, Alaska's rank overall is still poor:  we ranked 43rd in 2002 and 39th in 2009.

The report has a great discussion of the nuances of collecting and reporting graduation and dropout rates, and makes the point that a state can have a low dropout rate while still having a poor graduation rate.

The number of schools in rural Alaska declining

The New York Times reports on the decline in the number of schools in rural Alaska: "As Alaska celebrates its 50th anniversary of statehood amid new political prominence and urban aspirations, it is confronting a legacy of loss in rural communities that are unlike any others in the United States.

"Some of these communities, like Nikolski, are linked to the earliest human settlements in North America, yet are now buckling beneath the accumulated conflict of old versus new. Alaska Natives are increasingly leaving villages for cities. Young women, in particular, have departed, and birth rates, once disproportionately higher in villages, have dropped. Jobs for the young people who remain are declining. Village elders have fewer peers who share their dialects. Heating fuel, gasoline and groceries can be expensive and medical services minimal.

"The annual statewide student counting period, completed last month, is a census of the exodus. After several decades of growth, the overall rural population has declined about 4 percent since 2000 and much more in many regions. In the Aleutians, the population is down 19 percent, to about 4,500. About 20 percent of Alaska’s 680,000 people live in rural areas."

Rural population declining, impacts schools

One of the ironies of modernization is that predominantly Alaska Native rural communities have responded to the cash economy by losing population to urban areas where the jobs are. This trend receives its first serious study in Alaska’s Rural Population and School Population Trends from the Division of Community and Regional Affairs.

“Alaska’s rural population is declining. While the decline is broad-based, some areas are still experiencing population growth mostly due to natural increase. Overall, rural Alaska has been experiencing lower birth rates than in past decades. Out-migration from rural Alaska has accelerated and natural increase in many areas has not offset the population losses. Moreover, changes in demographics point at the aging of rural residents.

“School population in rural Alaska has declined, much stronger than overall population. Since 2000, hub schools have lost the most students but rural school student counts have also fallen. This suggests that the overall population decline in rural Alaska will continue.”

Anchorage School District Profile of Performance

The Anchorage School District, educating 50,000 kids speaking 84 languages, will absorb about $581 billion in general funding for the 2008-09 school year. What we get for all this is summed up in their annual Profile of Performance, an abbreviated version of which ("Expect the Best") was inserted into the Anchorage Daily News on Tuesday, November 11.

From the press release: "Much of the 2007-08 test score data was flat or declined slightly, following several years of solid growth... The district did see solid improvement in lowering its preliminary dropout rate. The board’s goal of a 5 percent decrease was surpassed with an 18.46 percent decline bringing the overall dropout rate to 4.16 percent. In the past four years, the dropout rate of ASD students has decreased by more than one-third. The 2007-08 preliminary graduation rate realized a small decline, less than 1 percent from 64.99 percent to 64.33 percent."

So despite some bumps in the road, the general consensus seems to be that the district is trending in the right direction overall. ADN has an education-specific page on their web site that is a useful guide to more information.

Schools Need Students to Score Cash

The Anchorage Daily News has an important story on how schools are funded: basically there's a 20 day period right about now where they count up the students who are attending and then pay the schools by the pupil. This is critical because if a community loses a school it's basically dead:

"The state pays most public education costs in Alaska. Some districts have more local contribution, like in Anchorage, where about 30 percent of the school budget comes from city property taxes. The state divvies its money under a complicated formula that considers the district’s size and the needs of its students. For example, significantly more money is paid for special-needs kids. At the heart of all calculations, though, is the number of students."

Problems with this system include the fact that money isn't allocated until schools are well into their academic year, and because dividends just hit a lot of rural families take the kids and head to urban centers, thus depressing the count in rural schools. Rural schools are feeling the pinch anyway, as enrollment is down there but up in urban districts like Anchorage and Mat Su. Schools need a minimum of ten students to receive state funding, and the article points out that "more than 20 schools have shut down since 1999..."