PHOENIX — The Arizona Auditor General has released a comprehensive report on education spending in Arizona.
It also went into detail on classroom spending and average teacher pay at the district level. Included in the data is the percentage of students who passed state assessments last year in Math, English Language Arts, and Science.
The report compares this past school year to 2018 and 2019 as assessments were not administered in 2020 due to COVID-19 and assessment data was incomplete in 2021. For the 2022 academic year, the state’s AzMerit test was replaced with the Arizona Academic Standards Assessment (AASA) in Math and English Language Arts and the Arizona Science Test (AzSCI) for science.
The percentage of students passing math in 2022 fell by nine points from 42% to 33%. There was little change in English Language Arts scores between 2019 and 2022. The share of students passing the Science assessment test fell by more than half to 24% compared to 51% in 2019.
Schools that are classified by the National Center for Education Statistics as being in suburban areas, fared the best in all subjects.
Students in city school districts ranked second on average but with a noticeable drop in the number of students passing. The data shows districts located in towns, defined by the NCES as areas inside urban clusters with a population of less than 100,000, had the lowest share of passing students.
In most cases, there was a correlation between the percentage of students passing and the poverty rate of the school district.
In general, as the poverty rate of the district decreased the percentage of students passing, a subject rose.
Outliers existed in all three assessments where the district had a higher-than-average number of students passing in school districts with poverty rates above 20%.
In Maricopa County, the best-performing district overall was Cave Creek Unified School District. This was followed by the unified school districts in Scottsdale, Higley, and Deer Valley.
The full list of assessment scores can be found below.
