Commissioner defends Alaska's grades in report

JUNEAU -- A national trade publication is giving Alaska low grades for its efforts in education, but Alaska's education commissioner claims Education Week ignores the state's unique circumstances.

A report by Education Week, based out of Washington, D. C., could push Alaska school districts away from a major school reform plan and makes no connection to student performance, according to Alaska Department of Education and Early Development Commissioner Shirley Holloway, Ph.D.

"Alaska has been trying to improve student achievement for a decade in a planned and systematic way," Holloway said in a recent press release. "We have not been trying to adopt the education policies that Education Week thinks all 50 states should have. Again, the one-size-fits-all criteria used by the editors of this newspaper ignore state and local circumstances."

Holloway recently issued the same caution that the Department of Education has issued during the past two years to Alaska's news media and other Alaskans who hear about the report, called "Quality Counts," published by Education Week.

"It is very important for Alaskans, especially the news media, to realize that Education Week is grading the policies that state-level policymakers have chosen to adopt or not adopt," Holloway said. "The report does not rate our schools or students and should in no way be interpreted to reflect poorly on our schools or students."

According to information from their office, the Department of Education received a copy of the Quality Counts report and had not yet analyzed its findings and methodologies.

Education Week planned to make the report public Monday.

This year, according to information from the Department of Education, some of Alaska's grades in Quality Counts stayed the same and some improved. Alaska's policy makers received a grade of "D" in standards and accountability, up from a D-minus last year.

Last year's grade was issued largely because Alaska's standards-based Quality Schools Initiative focuses on the basics -- reading, writing and math -- but does not focus strongly on social studies and science. Alaska has performance standards in science and content standards in social studies, but does not require a statewide assessment as it does in reading, writing and math. The Department of Education presumed this year's grade was low for the same reason.

The grade was also low because Alaska no longer participates in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests, a decision the Department of Education officials said was made years ago for several reasons. The Department of Education now assesses whether students are meeting reading, writing and math standards in the third, sixth and eighth grades, and with the High School Graduation Qualifying Exam. But NAEP only tests samples of students at two grade levels, does not make individual student scores available to the state or the schools, and only provides a state score for comparison to other states.

"If NAEP provided diagnostic data about students, we would participate," Holloway said. "Right now we believe we are assessing our students' progress sufficiently with our own state exams."

Alaska has administered the NAEP only once, in 1996, according to the Department of Education, and Alaska's students reportedly scored very well when compared with other states. Alaska also requires schools to administer the TerraNova nationally normed exams to fourth-, fifth- and ninth-grade students.

The report also gave Alaska a "D" in improving teacher quality, up from a D-minus last year. Last year's grade, according to the Department of Education information, was given largely because Alaska requires applicants for an Alaska teaching certificate to pass only a basic skills exam, not a subject-specific test. Another factor is that the state does not require secondary teachers to have a degree in the subject they teach, although some large school districts in Alaska have such a requirement. This is difficult to mandate at the state level, according to the Department of Education, because of the many small schools in Alaska where teachers teach multiple subjects to students across grade levels.

This year Alaska received a "C" in funding equity between school districts, the same as last year, and a "C" in funding adequacy, up from an "F" last year. Education Week this year changed its grading criteria for funding adequacy.

"Our state is heavily involved in implementing the Quality Schools Initiative, which will give students and families a passport to a bright future," Holloway said. "We feel like we're making progress. It's unfortunate that each year Education Week changed its grading criteria -- so much so that even Education Week has cautioned against comparing a state's grades from one year to the next.

"I think it is inappropriate for Education Week to give states a letter grade to indicate whether they have put in place a policy that satisfies the newspaper," she said. "For those who think grades are appropriate, it's important to note the average grade nationwide was a C."

Holloway noted that the National Governors' Association and Achieve Inc., a group of business leaders from America's top corporations, in recent years, concluded that accountability initiatives like Alaska's are the right approach to improving student achievement.

The Quality Schools Initiative, among other things, requires schools to teach and students to learn state standards in reading, writing and math.

It includes a new statewide system of assessment to measure whether students are meeting the standards at the third, sixth and eighth grades.

It also requires students to pass a high school graduation exam and creates an accountability system that will rank school districts on how well their students perform.