PHOENIX — For years, Arizona ranked toward the bottom for education in many reports, alongside several states, including Mississippi. But this year, in one report, the southern state ranked 16th, while Arizona still sat in the 40s.
According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Kids Count Data Book this year, Arizona ranked 47th for education.
“We’ve got a long way to go,” Superintendent Tom Horne said of Arizona’s ranking.
Educators and organizations working to improve education and child well-being in the state continue to recognize the need to improve Arizona’s education.
“This issue with our state not investing with our full-on services for our children is making a huge impact. It's a ripple effect,” said Krystyn Paulat, the director of early learning and child education at the Arizona Children’s Action Alliance.
The organization partners with the Annie E. Casey Foundation for contributions to the report. All states have organizations that partner with the nonprofit for the report that has come out for more than 30 years now.
One state, Mississippi, sat at the bottom with Arizona for quite some time until this year.
“As far as I would remember, people would say, 'Thank God for Mississippi,’” Horne said.
According to the Kids Count Data Book this year, Mississippi ranked 16th in education.
“I was amazed. To see they've been able to turn it around, again, because they always had that excuse of, ‘We're so poor and all this,’ but they made it a priority,” said Clinton Hughes, a middle school science teacher in the Deer Valley Unified School District.
Before Hughes moved to Arizona in 2011, he taught in Mississippi.
“I remember my first year, I was teaching 8th grade and the ELA teacher told me that the average reading level for one of our 8th grade students is 3rd grade,” he recalled. “It was pretty bad in a lot of ways.”
The southern state turned the tide, some even dubbing it the “Mississippi Miracle.” Several people ABC15 interviewed for this piece called it that. However, Mississippi State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Dr. Lance Evans, doesn’t see it that way.
“We take a little bit of offense to the idea of it being a miracle because there was no miracle whatsoever at all. We refer to it as the marathon,” he said.
Change to education policies in Mississippi happened more than a decade ago, and in recent years, the state finally saw positive changes to its academic scores in what’s called the NAEP scores, or also known as the Nation’s Report Card.
Evans said it began with the Literacy Based Promotion Act of 2013, or what some in the state referred to as the third-grade reading gate.
The state started testing students’ literacy in third grade and held kids back if they didn’t pass.
Darein Spann, the president of the Mississippi Association of Educators, said the new law was not very welcomed at first.
“When that bill was passed and signed into law, we all were, ‘No more,’ because it was another test that kids were having to take,” Spann said. “But, hey, here we are, 2025, and we're the 16th of the nation.”
Superintendent Horne said he wants schools to be more adamant about holding back kids if they’re not reading at grade level.
“We hold back less than 1% of our students. If we want to get the same results they have, we're going to have to toughen up,” Horne said.
There are multiple other factors for Mississippi’s success. The Children’s Foundation of Mississippi, which helps with the same report, said it took years of hard work, multiple policies and different factors.
“The key for Mississippi is that we've held steady when some other states' performances have worsened, and we made it through and on the other side of COVID in a way that other states have not,” said Linda Southward, the executive director of the Children’s Foundation of Mississippi.
It is important to note that it is only one report of many that uses different metrics.
The Kids Count Data Book looks at:
- The number of young children not in school
- Fourth-grade reading proficiency
- Eighth-grade math proficiency
- High school graduation rates
In addition to adding that test for third graders, the state also ensured its educators are trained in a practice called the Science of Reading. They also deployed different subject-focused coaches into schools and helped students instead of solely relying on teachers.
“We want the teachers with us for the long haul, if you will. And for us, when we are able to build that capacity in them, that just carries on,” Evans said.
Mississippi also invested in early childhood education. Southward said they had what’s called the Pre-K Early Learning Collaboratives that started in 2013.
“Which was the first time that public state public dollars were given for pre-k programs,” she said.
Evans said school districts were given funds to join the collaborative and start up early learning classrooms so younger kids can get an early start to learning. He said about 20% of their kids now are in those early learning programs and “the other large portion” are in different types of pre-k programs.
There are things to consider as the two states are different from each other. Arizona elects its top schools chief, but in Mississippi, the state superintendent is hired by its State Board of Education and needs to be confirmed by its senate.
Another big difference: money. Arizona has a higher budget than Mississippi and also spends more for education, with Arizona having about 1.1 million students versus Mississippi’s 436,000 students. Despite the Grand Canyon State having more money, Mississippi still spends more per pupil, according to data from the 2023 Census Bureau.
“Arizona does have the wealth to make it happen, but what we're seeing consistently from the legislature is it's not happening,” Hughes said.
The way Arizona funds education compared to Mississippi is somewhat the same. It surrounds students, starting with a base amount, and then it’s also weighted for students with different needs, meaning more money goes to schools if they have certain needs.
In Arizona, in Fiscal Year 2025-26, the Arizona Department of Education says the base student funding was set to a little more than $5,000 by the state. Again, it is weighted to the needs of the student, but teacher performance pay is also factored in. The state also equalizes funding for districts that doesn’t have as a high of a tax rate compared to others.
In the southern state, Evans said their base student funding was around $7,700.
However, in Arizona schools, they also rely on bonds and overrides, whereas in Mississippi, that’s not as common.
Despite all this, Evans said there are ways for Arizona to reach the same outcome.
“It comes down to a mindset and just an expectation of you know that you are that we are going to achieve this together,” he said.
“The history there [in Mississippi], with education, is very grim. But it looks like they're overcoming that, and that's amazing. Arizona has everything we need, all the resources we need to make it happen, too,” Hughes added.
What is Arizona doing to improve education?
Organization Read On Arizona is leading a charge, in conjunction with several state agencies, to help improve literacy rates. This summer, the nonprofit launched the Arizona Literacy Plan 2030, hoping to increase third-grade literacy rates from 39% to 72% by 2030.
The plan started with inspiration from southern states, where gains were seen in NAEP scores, including in Mississippi.
“In 2018, we did a learning exchange, a three-year learning exchange with Mississippi to really understand, take a deep dive into what they're doing,” said Terri Clark, the literacy director with Read On Arizona.
The initiative aims to put more literacy coaches in schools to help students learn how to read. That new plan is underway, as ABC15 recently highlighted at the Pendergast Elementary School District. The state is providing grant funding for districts to hire more literacy coaches.
“Right now, we have 34 coaches in our state with our goal of being 125,” Paulat said.
Arizona is also working on getting teachers trained on the Science of Reading.
“The science of reading is using neuroscience to understand how the brain learns how to read and that's what helps our students to become better readers, because we're teaching them in a systematic, explicit, structured way,” explained academic interventionist Holly Cook in 2023. Cook works for the Kyrene Elementary School District, where ABC15 profiled the district’s gains in reading scores with this practice.
A law passed by the state several years ago, requiring kindergarten through fifth-grade teachers, who work with literacy instruction, to receive a literacy endorsement certification in the science of reading by 2028. There are different timelines for certain skilled or new teachers.
“We only have 10% of our teachers trained in the science of reading so far. We need to get to 100% by 2028,” Clark said.
Superintendent Horne’s office has also sent out what they’re calling “solutions teams” to schools that are underperforming. Horne said staff from the Arizona Department of Education are going to those schools and helping them one-on-one.
“One of their projects is helping the bottom 5% of schools, which is about 90 something schools. After a year, 70% of them were no longer in the bottom 5%,” he said.
While progress is being made, it may take time to see significant changes, which Mississippi has only started to see in the last few years. Policy changes were implemented more than a decade ago there.
“When you're talking about this type of work, it does take many, many, many years. And then when you get to the point to where you're starting to really reap the benefits of the success, you have to start pushing and continue to push and continue to push,” Evans advised.
“I know we have an awful lot of work to do, and that's what I’m devoted to,” Horne added.
