For many years the lack of adequate funding has been mentioned as the culprit for many of Arizona's education woes. In a report entitled "Quality Counts 2000" Education Week magazine rated Arizona last in the entire country in that year with respect to resources provided to public schools. In that survey there were four major measures of state education systems. Arizona received a B+ in "Standards and Accountability," a D- in both "School Climate" (related to classroom sizes) and "Improving Teacher Quality," (lack of teacher development, teachers may teach subjects for which they did not major in college) but ranked last in "Resources." According to the Arizona School Boards Association, "This report is simply one more in a series of national studies that have pointed out the desperate lack of funding for schools in Arizona."

Later that same year, the voters of Arizona overwhelmingly approved a multi-million funding package for classroom and teacher needs. To receive that funding schools were required to be more accountable for academic performance. In order to ensure that we did not throw more money at an ailing system, and to comply with the requirements of the federal "No Child Left Behind" Act of 2001, Governor Jane Dee Hull signed House Bill 2658, known as "Arizona LEARNS," on May 21, 2002.

Arizona LEARNS is a rating system for our schools. Almost every school has been evaluated, based on three years performance, as being one of the following four categories:

Underperforming: needs to meet state performance and state progress goals.

Maintaining Performance: meets state performance goals, and needs to meet state progress goals.

Improving: exceeds state performance and state progress goals.

Excelling K-8: 90% of pupils achieved one year of academic progress in all subject areas of the Arizona measure of academic progress, and ninety percent passed all subject areas of the AIMS test.

Excelling 9-12: 90% of pupils passed all subject areas of the AIMS test, the dropout rate is no more than six per cent and the school's graduation rate is at least ninety per cent.

Nearly one in seven public schools, including some charter schools, scored in the lowest category and were defined as "underperforming." About 25% of the schools made the second-best category, "improving," and about 30% of the schools were given the "maintaining performance" designation. Although there is certainly much room for improvement, the results were not as dismal as many expected.

Any school designated as "underperforming" will implement a school improvement plan with the help of residents in the school's attendance area and the Arizona Department of Education. Schools notified residents they are "underperforming" and have developed an improvement plan. Schools will implement their improvement plan with help from the Arizona Department of Education, but will also require the active support of the school, residents and parents.

These efforts come at a a difficult time for Arizona. Faced with a huge budget deficit, it will be difficult to give the schools the funding they would like to meet the required standards. Arizona has received more than $150 million in new federal grant money, some of which is earmarked specifically for "underperforming" schools. According to the ADE, that new money will be used to operate after-school tutoring centers for children and their family members, provide additional resources to small or rural schools, hire county reading specialists and better train teachers in reading instruction. It will also be used for the recruitment and retention of special education teachers.

In 2012 the rating system mentioned here was changed to reflect and A-F system. Underperforming schools would have a D or F rating. Here is more information about the new rating system.