The analysis cites crowded classrooms, low graduation rates and inadequate funding

Arizona’s public education system has maintained its dead-last ranking in a survey of all 50 states for the second year in a row.

The rankings, released last week by Consumer Affairs, a product information and research company, scored states by evaluating graduation rates, standardized test scores, funding levels, class size, quality of higher education and safety.

Arizona scored among the worst on all of those metrics except for higher education. The Grand Canyon State was ranked dead last for public school funding, 49th for student performance and 47th for school safety. The state’s colleges and universities fared comparatively better, ranking 35th in the nation.

Contributing to Arizona’s poor rankings were its crowded classrooms, with an average student to teacher ratio of 23-to-1, along with its worst-in-the-nation 78% high school graduation rate.

Consumer Affairs noted the state’s “strong culture around school choice” in its report, highlighting its school voucher program that was expanded in 2022 to be available to all K-12 students in the state.

The report highlighted the cost of the program, which is expected to reach $1 billion this school year with more than 92,000 students enrolled.

The Empowerment Scholarship Account voucher program, known commonly as ESAs, was created in 2012 to provide vouchers for students with disabilities. It was expanded incrementally after that to include students in foster care and those attending failing public schools until Republicans in the state legislature, along with Gov. Doug Ducey expanded it to apply to all one million K-12 students.

The program gives the parents of participating students a debit card that can be used to pay for various educational costs, or reimburses the parents for those costs. Within a year after the universal expansion, it went from serving around 12,000 students to nearly 70,000.

ESA money can be used to pay for private or parochial school tuition, homeschooling supplies — and even savings for college tuition.

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While Democrats and public schools advocate for strict guardrails on the ESA program to avoid fraud and improper purchases, Arizona has the lowest public school per-pupil spending in the country, and has been at the bottom for years.

Although the state has increased school funding numerous times over the past decade, it still lags well behind other states. According to the Arizona Department of Education, the state spent $11,703 per student in the 2023 fiscal year and $12,371 in 2024.

Most of the states that spend the least per-pupil on education are in the south and southwest, while those that spend the most are in the northeast.

New York is the top per-pupil spender at more than $34,000 per student, and has one of the lowest student-to-teacher ratios, at 12:1 and provides some of the best pay in the country. It ranked 18th in the nation for K-12 performance in the Consumer Affairs report.

Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne told the Arizona Mirror in a written statement that the ESA program doesn’t negatively impact public schools, because districts spend more per student than parents receive in vouchers, adding that “funding follows the student.”

But that isn’t true in almost every case, due to how the state funds public education. The only voucher students who save the state money are those who come from impoverished school districts, a tiny minority of voucher recipients.

In fact, the majority of students who use ESAs never attended a public school at all, so the costs of their private or home schooling are also entirely new to the state. How much a student gets for a voucher can vary greatly, with an average of $7,000 to $8,000 but climbing to more than $40,000 for some students with disabilities.

“The ESA program is no threat to public schools,” Horne wrote “There are nearly 1.2 million students in public schools and just over 90,000 ESA students, which is a very small percentage.”

Geneva Fuentes, communications director for the Arizona Education Association, the largest teacher union in the state, told the Mirror that she’s not sure how Horne could in good faith make such an argument.

“There is a decision that’s been made to direct $1 billion in Arizona state taxpayer money, not to the public schools that serve the vast majority of Arizona students, but to programs that end up being more of a black box than anything else,” she said. “We have very little data on how well students are performing in the schools that voucher dollars go to.”

Private schools that take ESA payments don’t have the same academic reporting, public meeting and background check requirements as public schools. And those private schools, many of which are religious, can discriminate against students and pick-and-choose who they allow to enroll.

“There are a lot of pitfalls with the program that Arizona lawmakers don’t seem interested in addressing,” Fuentes said. “And at the same time, our public schools are pinching pennies and struggling to fulfill their mission to serve every child with funding that isn’t just inadequate, it’s unconstitutionally inadequate.”

Fuentes was referring to a Maricopa County Superior Court ruling last month that found Arizona had chronically and unconstitutionally underfunded both school maintenance and short-term capital needs at public schools to the tune of billions of dollars over the past 20-plus years.

She challenged any lawmaker who might argue that more money doesn’t always equal better outcomes to tell that to principals at the schools highlighted in that lawsuit, where students have to maneuver trash cans to catch water from leaking roofs and use bathrooms full of black mold.

In response to the Consumer Affairs report, Horne pointed to a list of 15 initiatives he’s started since taking office in 2023, including raising test scores at schools in the bottom 5% with the help of “improvement teams” and expanding leadership training for principals.

Horne said that districts set their own absenteeism policies, but he’s encouraged them to adopt ones that are more stringent.

“I have called for schools to adopt measures that call for nine unexcused absences resulting in a student failing a course and five tardies counting as an absence,” Horne said. “The idea that a third of our students are missing 18 days of school or more is a real catastrophe and an emergency for our state. We need radical efforts to solve this problem.”

Horne also highlighted an artificial intelligence tutoring program that he implemented.

“It gives (teachers) the equivalent of two assistants to do the grunt work so they can concentrate on creative teaching,” he said.

Fuentes argued that more funding is necessary to bring in the best teachers, and to give them the ability to do their best work.

“More money gives you the ability to hire more teachers to lower class sizes,” she said, “and when you lower class sizes, students get more individualized attention, and it’s easier for them to make progress. You’re able to raise teachers salaries, which means that you’re able to recruit the best and brightest educators.”

Written by Caitlin Sievers and published by The Arizona Mirror ~ September 22, 2025