There's no shortage of discouraging news for Arizona today. In a prior post, we told you about Maricopa County's dismal national ranking in terms of job loss, and the latest news on the education front isn't any better.
According to the annual report from Editorial Projects in Education, Arizona ranks fifth-worst in the country in K-12 education.
Arizona earned an overall mark of C-, but in certain, individual areas, the Grand Canyon State fared much worse. For example, Arizona teachers got a big, fat D.
It's not all doom and gloom, especially if you ask Education Superintendent Tom Horne, whose love affair with the AIMS test seems to know no bounds.
Horne says the EPE report is worthless because it doesn't factor in a number of the positive aspects of education in Arizona that he says skew the numbers here.
Those factors -- as always with Horne -- are test scores.
"The message should be conveyed is that Arizona test scores are above the national average, even though there are many more poor kids in our state and we have a lot of kids we need to teach English to," Horne tells ABC 15. "We are still performing above the national average, that is something we should be praised for."
Poor and Spanish-speaking, or not, the bottom line is that there's a problem that can't be explained away with test scores. Need we forget that the majority of Arizona high school students couldn't pass a basic citizenship test?
Click here for a link to the study, as well as to a map that compares Arizona's educational woes with the rest of the nation.
