By Katie Wilcox
The State Board of Education voted unanimously Monday to eliminate controversial bonus points from the Arizona School Report Cards system. The state assigns letter grades to every public school, including charter schools, in Arizona on an A-F scale, and most schools have received some bonus points.
Without the bonus points factored in, state data show more than one-quarter of Arizona’s A-rated high schools would have earned a B instead.
The school letter grades are based on a variety of factors including student test scores, student growth on tests, and how many students are classified as English language learners, among other categories.
The system has faced significant criticism, culminating in a scathing Auditor General report released in June. The report found the state was “potentially inflating” school letter grades through the bonus points, among a list of other findings.
The vote on Monday to get rid of bonus points marks the first vote in a coming shake-up of the way schools in Arizona are evaluated. Exactly how the school letter grades will change remains unclear until the State Board of Education settles on a final reformulation, and discussions of more adjustments to the system are slated for coming meetings.
The takeaways:
- Arizona schools will not receive “bonus points” when the state calculates A-F school letter grades for the 2027-28 school year.
- Most Arizona schools received some bonus points, including all traditional high schools in 2025.
- The state’s data show that without bonus points, dozens of high schools and more than 100 K-8 schools would not have received an A rating last year.
- Arizona had more A and B-rated schools than nine other states with a similar grading system.
- The State Board of Education will continue voting on changes to the school letter-grade system, including how to measure student proficiency on standardized tests.
In Arizona, most public schools received an A or B letter grade, according to state data. In a presentation to board members, SBE’s Executive Director Sean Ross showed that compared to nine other states with similar grading scales for schools, Arizona had the most A or B-rated schools in 2025.
More than half of high schools in Arizona received A ratings, according to The Beam’s analysis of state letter-grade data.
The A ratings for high schools came even as three in five 11th graders failed to meet proficiency standards in the state’s required English language arts test, The Beam found, and seven in 10 failed to meet the state’s standards in math.
The state’s letter-grade system is designed to consider factors beyond proficiency in an effort to reward other positive outcomes for students and avoid penalizing schools serving higher-poverty populations.
During his presentation before the board, Ross pointed out, as he has during meetings leading up to the vote, that there is a strong correlation between proficiency and poverty. Because of that, he said, the current A-F letter-grade system, which was adopted in 2016, represented a “pretty significant philosophical shift” away from the primary focus on student proficiency.
“The reasoning given by the legislature, by the governor, and by the state board at the time for the need for the changes was really about the correlation between poverty and proficiency,” Ross said. “If the model were just proficiency-based, it would disadvantage students of low socioeconomic status and schools that serve those students.”
Students who qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch based on household income, The Beam found, are half as likely as their peers to pass the state standardized tests.
Ross explained that the current A-F letter-grade system was designed to measure schools in other categories, including student growth, to account for the impact of poverty on proficiency rates.
Still, the system is facing an overhaul, beginning with the removal of bonus points.
State records show that 99% of high schools received bonus points.
At least 34 of the 122 A-rated high schools would not have earned that grade last year without bonus points, according to state data. Without the bonus points, 21% of the 232 rated high schools’ letter grades would have been lower.
Traditional high schools could earn up to nine bonus points for special education enrollment, science proficiency, military or postsecondary enrollment and ninth-grade testing participation.
During public comment, Arizona State University emeritus professor Hans van der Mars spoke in favor of keeping bonus points. Van der Mars was a professor in ASU’s Mary Lou Fulton College of Teaching and Learning Innovation and spent decades researching and teaching physical education teachers.
“Schools value access to earning bonus points for incorporating such so-called non-core subjects,” van der Mars said. “They are precisely the incentives for schools to work toward, to at least offer a semblance of whole child education.”
The state board received the recommendation to remove bonus points from the Accountability Technical Advisory Committee, which includes public school administrators, education experts and researchers. The committee unanimously agreed to remove bonus points from the A-F letter-grade system but said it would work to integrate some of the factors into other categories as it updates the rest of the A-F letter-grade system.
The state board of education is expected to vote on further changes to the A-F letter-grade system throughout the rest of the year. It is currently scheduled to adopt the new rules by January, which would take effect for the 2027-28 academic year.