Arizona public schools are in the midst of a new scandal over a growing gap between the number of students who graduate and the number of students who actually have proficiency according to state standards.
Since I live in Tucson, which has one of the worst public school districts in our state with chronic failure and absenteeism problems, this is not exactly a surprise to me. There’s a reason that those who can afford to send their kids to private schools or homeschool using the state voucher program or private income pull their kids out of TUSD schools.
But unfortunately, it seems Tucson is not the only area of Arizona with a massive educational crisis. And given how corrupt the public school system across our nation is, that too is not altogether surprising. Add in the large numbers of illegal alien students here and the state government dominated by Democrats, and you have a recipe for disaster.
In 2025, only two out of five 11th-grade students met their English Language Arts state proficiency standards. For math proficiency, the number was even lower, 12News reported. Arizona State University's Howard Center for Investigative Journalism partnered with 12News to analyze the data and found that low-income students (again, many of whom are immigrants) are half as likely to meet proficiency standards, though their graduation rate is 80% like their peers.
And the stupid, woke system Arizona has for ranking schools sometimes gives a high grade to schools with the largest number of failing students. It's grown so bad the Arizona Board of Education is actually looking to reform the ranking system.
Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, a Republican, has slowly been looking at overhaul options since his 2022 election, but obviously not fast enough. “I recognized immediately that parents were feeling misled because the school might have an A with a low proficiency rate,” he said. “I recognized right away we had to make adjustments and we started working on it.” One of the big changes would be to make the rankings much more dependent on proficiency scores.
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Rep. Nancy Gutierrez, a Democrat in Tucson, had the same failed solution of investing more taxpayer money. The problem is that giving more cash to underqualified teachers to do more of the same ineffective teaching doesn't do anything except make the underqualified also overpaid. Nor does it address the root causes of school and student failure: leftist brainwashing, low literacy, mass migration, broken homes, excessive technology use, and rock-bottom standards.
Public schools across the country have lowered their standards within the last few decades, and yet still students cannot meet even those greatly lowered standards. Part of it is the huge influx of illegal aliens, but America has managed to assimilate large numbers of immigrants before. The reality is that Arizona’s public school system is broken, with many administrators and educators who demand ever more money, even though they themselves are ignorant, woke, and incompetent. They're ideologues before they're educators.
If only states would return to the Booker T. Washington model of education, blending classical learning with practical skills training, and all having to meet high standards. That truly would be a solution to the crisis.
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