An even bigger educational challenge here is with Alaska Native students. The state's largest minority group, they are farther behind than everyone else. They're not catching up very fast, either, says Diane Hirshberg, associate professor of Education Policy at UAA.
NO BIG GAINS
"We are not making huge gains. We are not going to close the achievement gap" on the timeline mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act, Hirshberg says.
Poverty helps explain the persistent disparities. No matter the ethnic group, students from impoverished families do markedly worse. Poverty is more common among minority groups.
But poverty doesn't explain the entire minority achievement gap.
"Those students are fully capable of learning," says Lexi Hill, a UAA data analyst who does education research with professor Hirshberg. "We don't yet have the answer."
TURNOVER, OTHER PROBLEMS
Teacher turnover in small, rural, heavily Native schools is a key concern, says Hill. She and Hirshberg say Alaska needs to grow more of our own teachers and to give in-depth cultural orientation to teachers coming here from Outside. UAA used to run a successful culture camp for new teachers, they said, but federal funding ran out.
Hirshberg also faults curricula that are often quite foreign to Native students' experience. Students would learn better if the lessons are couched in their own culture and experience.
INTERDISCIPLINARY WHALING
One example: On the North Slope, Hirshberg suggests, learning could revolve around whaling, the keystone of local Native culture. For literature, students could read Moby Dick. They could study the biology of the living whale and the physics of moving a 20-ton carcass out of the water and across the ice. They could write down whaling stories told by their elders.
In the Bush, the two experts say the school calendar could follow the subsistence seasons, instead of aping the Lower 48's traditional nine-month, summer-off schedule.
For all the experts' advice, though, it's not clear that there is a viable education model that will work in the smallest, most traditional and isolated rural villages. Recruiting teachers, adjusting curricula and school schedules, and improving schools are just a few of the many challenges those villages face as they struggle to survive.
One thing's for sure, says Hirshberg, "It's not about giving more of the same," an approach she calls "drill and kill."
The Yup'ik immersion school in Bethel is a shining example of what's possible, she says. The teachers are from the community, they believe in the children and the children respond.
OTHER WAYS TO HELP
In Anchorage this past year, some schools offered after-hours support to struggling students. Parents adored it and teachers said students progressed well with the extra help, says Hill. Yet every one of these after-school programs had a waiting list, she notes.
Hill and Hirshberg credit Anchorage superintendent Carol Comeau for efforts to help students whose parents move around the city during the school year. Offering transportation back to their original school is helpful. Making sure different schools cover the same core material at the same time of the year also helps keep those transient students on track.
YES, MORE MONEY
Extra efforts like these all take more money. And that prompts a familiar complaint - "You're just throwing more money at schools."
"It's easy to throw money (into schools) ineffectively," Hill says. "That doesn't mean money is irrelevant."
Alaska has its share of schools and teachers who can really push students to excel, Hirshberg says. "The question is how to get all the teachers to do it with all students."
There is no single easy answer. The two experts' advice might be summed up this way: It takes a willingness to experiment, then you have to track the results of the new efforts, stop what doesn't work and pay for what does.
BOTTOM LINE: There are no easy answers for closing the achievement gap between Alaska's white and minority students.
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