Alaska judge calls for more school oversight.

THE STATE OF ALASKA MUST improve its oversight of persistently under-performing school districts to ensure that students are getting an adequate education or it will no longer be able to use its high school exit exam, State Superior Court Judge Sharon Gleason ruled in June.

If state officials do not perform sufficient oversight of poor-performing districts, Gleason may permanently suspend the use of the exit exam and order reforms.

Gleason is allowing Alaska to continue administering the exam for the year while it overhauls its process for accountability and oversight.

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The court ruling came in a lawsuit brought by the Bering Strait, Kuspuk, and Yupiit districts, the state teachers union, parents, and an educational advocacy group arguing that state officials were violating Alaska's constitution by providing inadequate school funding.

Gleason, however, ruled that school funding was sufficient but that the state hadn't done enough to monitor the chronically low-performing districts' spending and instruction.

"The state has failed to take meaningful action to maximize the likelihood that children at these troubled schools are afforded an adequate opportunity to acquire proficiency in the state standards when a school has demonstrated an unwillingness or inability to correct this situation on its own," she wrote.

Because students in low-performing districts such as Yupiit are not being given adequate learning opportunities, "it is fundamentally unfair to those children to condition the receipt of a high school diploma on the test at this time," she wrote.

But according to Eric Fry, information officer at the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development, the state feels that students do have the opportunity to adequately learn the material for the exit exam. He says that in some of the troubled districts "plenty of kids" are passing the test.

"That's not an excuse for any poor education that kids might be getting, but it doesn't sound like students are being denied the opportunity to learn [for] the exit exam," Fry says.

At the time of the court ruling, the state had already embarked on a new strategy for intervening in troubled districts, but it was too early at that point to know whether the effort was working, Fry adds.

In the 2005-2006 school year, the state began performing "instructional audits" of districts that had failed to meet Adequate Yearly Progress for four consecutive years and had not seen improvement in AYP and other standards-based assessment results. The audits--currently being conducted at the Lower Yukon, Northwest Arctic, Yukon-Koyukuk, Yukon Flats, and Yupiit districts--could result in changes to curricula and instructional methods, professional development, and the use of assessment data.

Fry says that the intervention program is working and that the Yupiit district saw proficiency rates in language arts increase 29 percent this past year.

The state hopes to persuade Gleason at another hearing that its audit program meets her requirements.