Alaska's 2025-26 test tables show 13,622 students with no English score

Alaska tested 79.61 percent of the students enrolled in its AK STAR grades this spring, leaving 13,622 students with no English language arts score. A year earlier the rate was 80.49 percent. AK STAR is the Alaska System for Transformational Academic Reporting, the state's reading and math test.

Federal law sets the participation threshold at 95 percent, and Alaska's accountability rules say a school that falls short does not have its missing students counted as failing outright. Instead, the achievement denominator is reset to 95 percent of the full-academic-year students eligible for testing, those enrolled the whole year, rounded up, which still lowers a school's measured proficiency rate. Under the state's System for School Success rules, a school that misses the 95 percent participation target for the all-students group or any subgroup for two consecutive years must write and submit an improvement plan to its district.

The Alaska Department of Education and Early Development published the 2025-26 results for AK STAR and the Alaska Science Assessment in early September. Its two-page summary reports that "The results show upward momentum in student achievement," particularly in grades 3 to 5, and that "Achievement in the higher grades remained relatively flat." The summary never uses the word participation.

Of 66,807 students enrolled in tested grades on the first day of the test window, 53,185 produced a valid English language arts score and 53,071 produced a mathematics score, a math participation rate of 79.44 percent. Science participation was 74.42 percent. Tenth grade science was lowest at 66.08 percent, leaving 3,145 tenth graders without a score. Statewide proficiency, published as 32.89 percent in English language arts and 32.20 percent in mathematics, is calculated only on students who tested. A year earlier it was 32.69 and 32.18 percent.

The summary does not name ninth grade mathematics, which has sat near 17 to 18 percent for three straight years: 18.04, 17.09 and 17.91 percent. The next lowest grade in mathematics was grade 6 at 31.65 percent.

Under 20 U.S.C. 6311, states must annually measure the achievement of not less than 95 percent of all students and 95 percent of each subgroup. Alaska's System for School Success Companion Document applies the rule: where a school falls short, the denominator becomes 95 percent of the full-academic-year students eligible for testing, rounded up. The document also states that the rule does not apply to academic growth, which carries 20 percent of a school's index for each subject, against 12.5 percent for achievement.

Of the 50 districts with a published figure, 26 reported participation below 95 percent. Those districts held 58,051 of the 66,352 students in that table, 87.5 percent; the 455-student gap against the statewide total sits in districts whose figures are not published. Anchorage reported 92.51 percent, Fairbanks North Star Borough 90.45, Kenai Peninsula Borough 84.44 and Matanuska-Susitna 77.92.

The three lowest rates in the state belonged to Nenana City, at 12.82 percent of 1,092 enrolled students, Galena City, at 14.40 percent of 4,507, and Yukon-Koyukuk, at 17.92 percent of 2,014. All three run correspondence programs the department designates Statewide Programs, enrolling students from across Alaska. Every one of the 13 districts with the lowest participation hosts a correspondence program, and the department's directory now lists 34 of them, several run from a district other than the one that holds them. Galena City's IDEA and Yukon-Koyukuk's Raven Homeschool are both administered from Fairbanks; Nenana City runs CyberLynx.

At the Alaska Senate Education Committee on April 24, Senator Loki Tobin said about 14 percent of correspondence students were opting out and asked how the department would meet the benchmark. Commissioner Deena Bishop said at that hearing that "in conversations with superintendents, there is some struggles with getting kids assessed," and pointed to the shift from paper testing to electronic testing.

The department's accountability page lists no 2025-2026 school designation list. The most recent complete list is for 2024-2025.