What Really Happened in Alaska? – Save Maine Schools

What Really Happened in Alaska? – Save Maine Schools:

What Really Happened in Alaska?

If you didn’t know better, you might think that whatever happened in the Chugach School District in Alaska over a decade ago was a full-blown, ed-reform miracle.

“This district literally leaves no child behind,” gushes Edutopia in this article, which describes the big jump in test scores its students made after switching to a competency-based system of education.

As tends to be the case with legends of ed reform, however, it doesn’t take a whole lot of digging for the whole thing to unravel.

First you find out that the only thing this district has in common with most American school districts is that it happens to be located on Planet Earth.

In Chugach, 214 students live in tiny villages spread out among 22,000 square miles. Students must be flown by private aircraft to reach school sites, and a majority of students are actually home-schooled.

Then you keep digging, and it all starts to get weird.

Like really weird.

You find out, for example, that the entire district wasWhat Really Happened in Alaska? – Save Maine Schools: