Summary
Muldoon Elementary is a PK–6 school in Anchorage, AK, within the Anchorage School District, serving 417 students from one of the city's most economically challenged neighborhoods. Muldoon is currently the lowest-ranked elementary school in Alaska, placing 166th out of 166 schools with a 0th-percentile score and zero stars. In 2025–26, proficiency rates were in single digits across all subjects — 9.9% in English language arts, 6.28% in math, and 8.2% in science — compared with district rates near 36–39%. That leaves a gap of roughly 26 to 31 percentage points below the district average, and state-level gaps are just as large. The deficit widens as students progress: by 5th grade, the science gap reaches more than 35 points, and math proficiency is less than one-fifth of the district rate.
Perhaps most telling, low performance spans every measurable subgroup, from female and male students to English language learners and low-income students, with each group ranking at or near the bottom compared with peers statewide. The school's free/reduced-price lunch participation rate was 104% for 2024–25, reflecting a nearly universal meal program. But poverty alone does not explain the results. Nearby Wonder Park Elementary has an even higher poverty rate, yet its math proficiency is nearly four times higher, and its ELA proficiency is nearly double Muldoon's. Creekside Park Elementary, less than a mile away, also serves a heavily low-income population and beats Muldoon by roughly 8 points in ELA and 9 in math.
Even within the bottom cluster of nearby schools, Muldoon is consistently the weakest. Its math and science scores trail every neighboring school with available data, and its ELA score is nearly identical to Ptarmigan Elementary's, though Ptarmigan does meaningfully better in math and science. Muldoon also carries a relatively high student-to-teacher ratio of 18.3-to-1, compared with 14.4 at Wonder Park and 15.0 at Ptarmigan — a resource difference that may matter more than per-student spending, which is moderate at $17,361. The sharpest recent signal is the 2025–26 drop: math proficiency fell by nearly half in a single year, deepening a trend already heading the wrong direction. This is not a new problem, but it is one that surrounding schools show can be addressed even under similar demographic and economic pressure.
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