May 5, 2009

Tutors Work to Boost Native students

by Meghan Holland, Originally published in the Anchorage Daily News on 4/9/09

Dropout rates are higher, test scores are lower than for students overall

Shafts of sunlight stream through the windows and illuminate the four sixth-graders gathered around the table with Kerri Wood.

Wood is working to solve a vexing problem: Get these kids up to grade level.

Wood is the Indian-education tutor at Tyson Elementary in Mountain View. She is part of a multi-pronged effort involving the Anchorage School District, nonprofits and tribal groups to close the test-score gap between Anchorage’s 4,200 Native students and the rest of the district’s 48,000 kids.

It’s not just poorer test results. Native students have also historically had the highest dropout rate in Anchorage.

Wood works for the school district but her salary is funded by federal Indian Education Act money. The district spends about $2 million of federal money a year on tutors like her. And while administrators say modest gains have been made, the gap is still big.

Last year, scores took a dive. Results in math, reading and writing lagged behind all students by some 15 percentage points.

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Filed under: Academic Learning Centers

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