Preliminary results show that more than 50 percent of Arizona 10th and 11th graders are "minimally proficient" in English language arts.
The Arizona Department of Education released Monday preliminary state level results that showed the percentage of state's 10th and 11th graders scoring worse on the standardized test's English portion than last year.
According to the results, 54 percent of Arizona 10th graders were graded minimally proficient in language arts. That's worse than last year when 47 percent scored that low.
For 11th graders, 53 percent scored minimally proficient, a slight jump from 2015.
AzMerit, short for Arizona's Measurement of Educational Readiness to Inform Teaching, measures the state's new teaching standards, commonly known as Common Core. The test was first administered in 2015 to public school students grades 3 through high school.
