In Alaska, school equality elusive

The state must improve education in rural areas before requiring students to pass the state exit exam, a judge recently ruled.

By Yereth Rosen | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the August 3, 2007 edition

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ANCHORAGE, Alaska - When Bill Bjork and Debby Drong-Bjork taught school for six years in Arctic Village, Alaska, their tasks extended far beyond the classroom.

They had to chop ice on the Chandalar River and pump drinking water for students in the isolated Gwich'in Indian village. They coped with temperatures so cold that, every winter, their mattress froze to the wall of their teacher housing. And, because no grocery store was nearby, they had to learn from the school cook how to take meals from the caribou that migrated through that part of the Brooks Range foothills.

"She helped my wife and me learn to hunt, which was not a pretty sight at first," says Mr. Bjork. The transplanted Minnesotans embarked on their Arctic Village teaching adventure after a 1977 summer canoe trip on the Yukon River.

Teaching in rural Alaska has always been fraught with unusual challenges. Now, in the face of federal mandates, standards tailored for mainstream suburban culture, and costs that are rising at uneven rates across Alaska's expanses, there are new tests.

Educators, parents, and state officials are trying to comply with a recent court decision that found state funding for rural schools to be adequate but some of the schooling to be deficient.

The decision, issued June 21 by Alaska Superior Court Judge Sharon Gleason, found that while funding levels for far-flung districts met constitutional requirements, education quality was so poor in certain areas that students there should not be required to pass exit exams to get diplomas.

"It is fundamentally unfair for the State to hold students accountable for failing this exam when some students in this state have not been accorded a meaningful opportunity to learn the material on the exam – an opportunity that the State is constitutionally obligated to provide them," Judge Gleason said in her ruling. The state must do more to improve education in troubled districts, located in generally impoverished areas of rural Alaska, before reinstating the exit-exam requirement, Gleason said. It must report back on its progress in a year, she said.

The ruling came in response to a lawsuit filed in 2004 by an assortment of parents, teachers, and school district officials who believe state funding decisions shortchange their students. The plaintiffs say they found Gleason's conclusion puzzling. How can there be better service to rural Alaska, they ask, without more money?

"There seems to be a pattern of judges who are unwilling, as they look upon it, to intrude upon the domain of the legislature," says Bjork, who is now president of the Alaska chapter of the National Education Association, one of the plaintiffs in the litigation.

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