By Katie Wilcox and Evan Wyloge

In 2025, four out of five Arizona public high school seniors received diplomas, an increase for the state. 

However, that apparent improvement in educational outcomes is not reflected in state standardized test results. In 2025, just two in five students met the state proficiency standard in 11th-grade English Language Arts. Even fewer met the standard in 11th-grade math. 

The gap between the number of students who graduate each year and the number who meet academic standards is a clear warning sign, policymakers and educators say, that the current public education system is not working — and failing to set students up for success after high school. 

The problem is not new. It is getting worse, and it is even more pronounced for low-income students, who account for half of Arizona’s 1.1 million K-12 students. 

An analysis from The Beam at Arizona State University’s Howard Center for Investigative Journalism, in partnership with 12News, found that students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch are only half as likely as their peers to meet the state’s proficiency standards, even though both groups graduate at a rate of 80%. 

The state’s system for holding schools and districts accountable — a letter-grade system that ranks schools from A to F — does little to illuminate the problem for low-income students, with a complex structure of incentives that mean schools with rock-bottom student achievement in math and reading can end up with a top letter grade. 

While policymakers have debated ways to raise student proficiency, the gap between the share of students passing state proficiency tests and the graduation rate has grown since 2022. 

The Arizona State Board of Education is now moving forward with a revision of the A-F labeling system. While a growing chorus of policymakers, led by conservative politicians, has disparaged the letter-grade system, board analysts have warned that changing it could result in lower grades for high-poverty schools. 

What’s in a label?

The Arizona Department of Education uses the school report card system to assign A-F letter grades to charter schools, traditional public schools and districts. A state auditor general’s report released in June sharply criticized the current system. It said the current grading scale could inflate schools’ letter grades and allow schools to “attain a B letter grade indicating high performance even when very few students demonstrate proficiency.” 

In fact, The Beam’s analysis found that many A ratings went to high schools where a large majority of students failed to meet the state’s proficiency standards. 

In some cases, 11th-grade proficiency scores decreased even as a high school’s letter grade improved. 

The mismatch between letter grades and student achievement comes down to the formula used for the letter-grade system — a complex web of measures that creates incentives around other factors.

In response to growing discontent among education policymakers and mounting pressure from the auditor general’s report, the State Board of Education is weighing changes to the system.

Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne said reforming the letter-grade system became a key issue for him after his election in 2022.

“I recognized immediately that parents were feeling misled because the school might have an A with a low proficiency rate,” Horne said. “I recognized right away we had to make adjustments and we started working on it.” 

Horne, a Republican, previously served as the state superintendent of public instruction from 2003 to 2011. The superintendent serves as executive officer of the State Board of Education. Horne ran for reelection, but lost the Republican primary to challenger Kimberly Yee in late July. 

Horne told The Beam he would support changes that would cap letter grades based on proficiency scores. 

“My input is that if you’re not high proficiency but you are high growth, you can get a B but not an A,” Horne said. 

However, some public school educators raised concerns that assigning harsher letter grades to schools with lower standardized test scores could worsen student outcomes rather than improve them — particularly for students living in poverty.

More than a million students are enrolled in Arizona’s K-12 public education system, and more than half come from low-income households, according to department records. Years of research across the country show a strong correlation between household income and student test scores. 

In Arizona, low-income students have significantly lower passing rates on state standardized tests. 

“It’s very hard to get high proficiency if you’re in a high poverty area,” Horne said. “That’s just a fact of life.” 

“I think we need to consider that schools do so much more than just test our students,” said Tolleson Union Education Association President Melissa Girmscheid, who also teaches science in the district. “The test is one thing, preparing them for the world past school is entirely our job… and I would really hate for the letter grades to be reflective of just a very small portion of that.”

Rep. Nancy Gutierrez, a Tucson Democrat who taught in public schools for 20 years, called Horne’s proposed cap “incredibly shortsighted.” 

She argued that the state is trying to relabel schools without doing what she says would actually improve proficiency: paying for more help in the classroom.

“We haven’t spent money on enough tutors,” Gutierrez said. “People want to look at Mississippi and how they turned their proficiency rates around. And what they did wasn’t just have a plan. What they did was actually fund that plan. And that is what Arizona is not doing.”

Especially in low-income schools, she said, teachers are stretched across classes of 30 students, including English learners and students with disabilities, with little support.

“They need instructional help,” Gutierrez said. “And I believe that if Arizona funded these programs like this, we would see our proficiency rates skyrocket. But so far, we have not been able to do that.”

Letter grades are not directly tied to school funding, but they are tied to enrollment, a major driver of funding. That enrollment pressure is compounded by Arizona’s school-choice system, which lets parents withdraw their children from public schools entirely. Schools that post high grades can attract students; schools that post low grades can lose students, along with the money that follows them.

In 2022, Arizona created what was described as the nation’s first universal school voucher program by opening Empowerment Scholarship Accounts to every K-12 student, regardless of income. The program now provides more than $1 billion for about 100,000 students to pay for private school or homeschooling. 

Unlike public schools, private schools do not receive letter grades or evaluations from the Arizona Department of Education, and students in the ESA program are not required to take state standardized tests or report their scores. 

In 2026, Democrats in both the state House and Senate proposed legislation that would have required testing for students using ESAs. Neither bill received a vote. 

A-rated schools 

Inside State Farm Stadium on May 18, an enormous black curtain hid hundreds of La Joya Community High School students from the lights, cameras and crowd as they lined up to cross the stage and receive their diplomas. 

“I’m feeling kind of nervous,” said Aujunae May, a graduating senior. “I’m nervous, excited, happy to be out of school, excited to move on to the next step in life, so it’s like a lot of emotions running through me.”

Marching into the bright lights to the roar of a cheering crowd, the graduates celebrated their accomplishments and their impact on the school. 

“First of all, let’s make some noise for our A-rated graduating class of 2026,” Tolleson Union High School District Superintendent Jeremy Calles exclaimed at the start of his remarks. 

La Joya Community High School is part of the Tolleson Union High School District. It is a Title I school, meaning it receives additional federal funding for low-income students.

Of the school’s more than 2,300 students, 54% are considered to be in one of the two low-income categories used by the state.

“You have come through so much adversity,” Calles told the students. “You’re going to go farther than the generations before you have gone before — and you’re already doing that by being the first class to bring an ‘A’ to La Joya Community High School.” 

The school’s A rating came as more than three out of four 11th-grade students failed to pass the state standardized language arts and math tests in 2025. 

“They are lower than the state average, I’ll give that,” Calles said in an interview with The Beam, adding that he believes confusion can stem from a general misunderstanding of letter grades. 

Most people think of school grades the way they learned them growing up: A means 90% or above, B means between 80% and 90%, and so on. Anything below 60% would be failing. 

But that is not how the Arizona School Report Card system works. 

“If that was the standard,” Calles said, “then every single district in the state would be failing.” 

In fact, of the 29 Arizona districts with at least 500 students in the testing cohort, only six had 60% or more of students meet the state’s English language arts standard.

No district had 60% or more of its students meet the state’s math standard.

Grading public schools

The state’s formula counts proficiency as just one of five components factored into the letter grade for traditional high schools. Alternative high schools use a different formula. 

The five measures add up to 100 possible points: 

• Proficiency: 30 points
• Graduation: 20 points 
• Growth: 20 points 
• College and career readiness: 20 points 
• English learners: 10 points

Each category incorporates subfactors into the calculation, and some schools are not graded on all five categories. The total is standardized to a 100-point scale. 

The proficiency calculation weights student test scores. High-performing students’ scores add more points, while low-performing students’ scores count less.

Schools earn points for their graduation rate and for improving it. Points are awarded if 90% of students graduate in four years or if the school’s graduation rate improves two percentage points from the previous year. 

Growth is calculated using a formula that accounts for individual student performance on standardized tests. College and career readiness reflects the number of students participating in career training or Advanced Placement classes. The English learner category awards points for helping students who do not speak English. 

The formula compounds the problem. Proficiency counts for just 30 of the 100 points in a school’s score, and the state does not use the familiar scale most people grew up with to assign the grade itself. 

For an A, schools need only 82 of 100 points. 

For a B, schools need 65 of 100 points. 

More than half of Arizona’s traditional charter and district high schools earned A grades in 2025. 

Changing the incentives

For nearly a year, the State Board of Education has hosted a series of A-F letter-grade study sessions involving board members, Department of Education staff and members of the public. During the sessions, board members could ask questions, as Karla Phillips-Krivickas did in March: “Are we encouraging more diplomas with kids who are still not even reading at grade level?” 

Horne said he thinks measuring schools based on graduation rates creates the wrong incentives. 

“You can raise your graduation rate just by lowering your standards,” Horne said in an interview with The Beam. 

The State Board of Education has not made a final decision or received specific policy recommendations, but the board’s staff analyst said during public meetings that basing letter grades solely on proficiency would significantly lower school-letter grades, particularly for high-poverty schools. 

State Rep. Gutierrez said the debate misses the purpose of the grades.

“Letter grades were supposed to just give parents a tool,” she said. “And just tying it to proficiency does not give a parent an overall look at what that school is actually doing. Public schools are the root of the community… just to whittle it down to ‘are students proficient or not’ really doesn’t speak to all of the amazing things that are happening in a public school.”

Poverty and proficiency

In a September 2025 study session, the department’s chief accountability officer, Sean Smith, shared elementary and middle school proficiency data with the board to illustrate the significant correlation between poverty and proficiency. 

He said that as more students from high-poverty backgrounds take standardized tests, a school’s ability to earn full points for proficiency decreases sharply. 

The Beam analyzed four years of state data that also show low-income students have much lower passing rates on Arizona’s 11th-grade standardized math and language arts tests. 

Horne said he was aware of the correlation between poverty and proficiency but was not concerned that changing the scale could disadvantage high-poverty schools. 

“Well, B’s not bad,” Horne said. “You wouldn’t want them to be viewed as a ‘D’ school if they’re making good growth. But if their proficiency isn’t high, you wouldn’t want them to be an ‘A’ school either.” 

Gutierrez rejected the idea that low proficiency can be fixed by relabeling schools.

“Especially in low-income schools, we need reading coaches. We need folks who are there in the classroom, helping students,” she said.

Public school teacher Melissa Girmscheid also disagreed with Horne’s assessment. 

“We’re going to see the letter grades start to tie to ZIP code,” Girmscheid said.

If schools’ letter grades become a function of wealth and income parents may pull their children — and their enrollment dollars — from schools with low grades. That, Girmscheid said, could perpetuate a cycle that squeezes money from the state’s poorest areas. 

“Funding is already attached to ZIP code for so many of our students,” she said. “And now we’re going to attach letter grades to ZIP code and we’re going to attach student achievement to ZIP code essentially. Instead of attaching it to the students themselves or the school, the district that is doing the work – and it really is just differentiating students by their life experience and not by their ability.” 

The graduation gap

In the Yuma Union High School District, all seven in-person high schools receive Title I funding because of the high concentration of low-income students. Districtwide, 79% of students are classified as low-income.  

In 2025, only 19% of students at Gila Ridge High School in Yuma passed the 11th-grade standardized math assessment. 

Just 34% passed the 11th-grade state assessment in English language arts, down two percentage points from the previous year. 

Gila Ridge High School’s graduation rate was 91%. 

“Sometimes when you see that large gap, you might naturally think that, ‘oh, we are lowering expectations for students,’” said Dereck Bosch, Yuma Union High School District associate superintendent. 

“We feel that they are two different areas,” Bosch said of the graduation and proficiency rates. “While we recognize proficiency is low, we’re also working very hard to get those proficiency levels up while maintaining a high graduation rate because we want to keep kids in school.” 

Despite the decline in language arts proficiency, Gila Ridge High School’s letter grade improved from B to A in 2025. 

According to the state school report card, Gila Ridge earned 82.06 points, just six hundredths of a point above the threshold for an A.

Bosch said the Yuma Union High School District’s overall graduation rate of 94.1% is a good indicator of student achievement. 

“I think we should take a lot of pride in our grad rate,” Bosch said. “We may have a much lower graduation rate and our proficiency would still be the same — and I think that would be a much worse conversation.”

Asked whether he believes his students are prepared for life after graduation, Bosch said he would not look at test scores to answer that question.

“I’ve seen our kids in action and I know some of them may not test well, but I look at other skills that they have and I think they can absolutely be successful, yes,” Bosch said. 

In Tolleson, Superintendent Calles stands by the A-rated schools in his district, including La Joya Community High School, and pushes back against critics who say the schools do not deserve the rating. 

“Apparently moving all of our schools to A’s isn’t good enough for people,” Calles said, though the district does not yet have all A-rated high schools. 

“We are going to get to a point where people are just going to have to step back and say, look, they’re the best that’s ever done it.” 

Recent La Joya Community High School graduate Aujunae May said she was grateful for her time at the school. She transferred from out of state for her senior year and said she had struggled before coming to Tolleson. 

“Before here, I didn’t really know a lot of math, I didn’t really know a lot of reading,” May said. “This school really did help a lot… I never found a school like this.” 

After graduation, she said she remained uncertain about her future but was proud to have completed high school. 

“Being here is just an exciting day for me,” May said. 

Closing the gap

At the Center for the Future of Arizona, Peter Boyle leads education research. He said the state’s graduation gap is just one sign that students are not graduating with the skills they need to succeed. 

“I don’t think it’s fair to those students, I don’t think it is fair to our state,” Boyle said. “I don’t think it’s fair to our families and communities who’ve trusted our education system to get their students ready by high school.” 

He said the state should invest in research-based interventions that support higher proficiency and graduation rates. Boyle also said the state should find creative ways to support programs that help students. 

“There is a cost associated with public education, right?” Boyle said. “I think one of the things that we can do is think creatively about the resources we do have, whether that’s how we utilize our facilities, whether that is how we utilize our people, knowing that there could be limits.” 

In its April 2026 review, the National Education Association ranked Arizona 49th in public school current expenditures per enrolled student. 

Gutierrez, a member of the Legislature’s Democratic minority, put the shortfall bluntly: “Per pupil, we are at the bottom of the 50 states on what we spend per pupil in Arizona. And that’s the funding that needs to go up in order to hire reading specialists and folks that can be in the classroom with the teachers.”

The 2027 state budget signed by Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs on June 13 cut millions of dollars from education programs, including $3.4 million for the Ninth Grade On-Track program. 

The budgets of the Arizona Department of Education and State Board of Education also were reduced as part of across-the-board cuts to state agencies. 

Public school enrollment was also lower than expected, resulting in a decrease of $92 million from the projected base funding, according to a Joint Legislative Budget Committee report. The Legislature did not limit spending on the ESA program.

For Boyle, the problem remains “very serious” for the majority of Arizona students who graduate without meeting proficiency standards. 

“It’s not your fault. You’re a student. You’re in a system that isn’t yet meeting your needs,” he said.