Data-Driven Education Journalism for the Last Frontier
Education News & Data
Local education reporting from every corner of Alaska, grounded in Alaska Department of Education data.
Anchorage and Mat-Su improved in 2024-25, while Fairbanks and Juneau posted small increases in chronic absence. All remained below their 2021-22 rates.
Alaska recorded a third annual decline in chronic absence in 2024-25. The smaller improvement left the rate above its earlier baseline.
Alaska's published attendance rates show a narrowing gap for students with disabilities from 2021-22 to 2024-25, with a substantial gap to the earlier baseline.
Annual improvement slowed in Alaska's most recent attendance reports. Six comparable district-level reports, including Mount Edgecumbe, were at or below their pre-pandemic rates.
Across Alaska's five published chronic-absence years, Petersburg stayed below the state and its economically disadvantaged rate stayed within three points of the district total.
Kodiak Island Borough's chronic-absence variability ranked fourth-lowest among 18 Alaska districts with at least 1,000 students, while its pandemic-era increase ranked sixth-smallest.
Fairbanks' Black student chronic-absence rate fell from 52.2% in 2022 to 29.2% in 2025, 7.3 points below the district total.
Southeast Island's chronic absenteeism rate fell to 22.8%, 3.9 points below 2019, the second-widest recovery margin among six Alaska districts.
Valdez City School District cut chronic absenteeism by 25.6 percentage points from 2022 to 2025, the third-largest decline among 49 Alaska districts with positive rates reported at both endpoints.
White students posted an 85.8% four-year graduation rate in 2025, compared with 68.0% for Alaska Native students, the widest gap among six other reported race groups.
Alaska's same-report-year four-to-five-year gap reached 6.0 points in 2021, but those rates describe adjacent cohorts. Matched files show 2,649 net additional graduates over six years.
Alaska's special education graduation rate has barely moved in seven years while 471 students in the 2025 cohort left high school without a diploma.
In seven years of data, students who are currently homeless' graduation rate has never exceeded 65%. The 2025 rate of 63.4% is the best on record, and still 16.5 points below the state average.
Two-thirds of Alaska's 53 districts are majority-minority, but the state's racial composition has barely shifted in seven years of data.
Alaska Native students' four-year graduation rate rebounded from its 2022 low, but remained below the statewide rate in 2025.
