About 98 percent of Arizona high school seniors who completed required coursework have cleared their final hurdle to Graduation Day — passing all three sections of the AIMS test.
It's a big increase from a few months ago, when state officials thought 90 percent would graduate, but that was before students took the last part of the test earlier this spring.
The new numbers also seem to dilute the importance of the fights now taking place in courtrooms to quash the test as a graduation requirement.
The numbers were released by the Arizona Department of Education on Wednesday, based on math scores that were given to educators this week. It was the final portion of scores to be released this school year.
The figures are preliminary, officials said, but state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne said the early numbers seem to back up the estimates.
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Using a historical estimate that nearly 49,000 of Arizona's nearly 64,000 high school seniors will have enough credits to pass, the Education Department estimates about 94 percent — just over 46,000 — are likely to have passed all three sections of Arizona's Instrument to Measure Standards, a graduation requirement for the first time this year.
Add in the extra 4 percent of seniors who will earn a diploma because they have augmented grades from their core classes to boost their AIMS scores or are special-education students exempt from passing AIMS, and the state is going to graduate nearly 48,000 seniors this year.
That includes English-language learners, Horne said, because judges have tentatively ruled those students still need to pass the test to graduate.
Officials in Tucson-area districts were still dissecting results Wednesday and could not say exactly how many seniors will be left behind, but their numbers already were even surpassing state calculations.
Only one student at Flowing Wells High School needed to pass AIMS before the latest results were released. And in the Sunnyside Unified School District, five were in danger.
In Tucson Unified, the state's second-largest district, 82 seniors — about 2 percent of the district's 3,300 potential graduates — had not passed AIMS.
Sunnyside High Principal Raul Nido said the state numbers are promising, but added that his district has worked to get ahead of the curve.
"Our number is a lot lower than 2 percent," he said.
Local districts did not count English-language learners in their late-winter totals, though recent figures showed only a few dozen ELL seniors had not passed in Tucson before the math scores were released.
State and federal courts have decided so far that AIMS should be a graduation requirement for everyone. A state judge on Monday refused to issue an emergency stay on requiring students to take the test to graduate, but the case will continue.
Another suit suggests ELL students be excused from passing the test because they have not fully mastered English.
Before this spring's tests, only about 100 Tucson-area seniors were in danger of not graduating because they'd failed AIMS. Statewide, that number was almost 4,900, or 90 percent of seniors with enough credits.
Horne said he expected this high graduation rate two years ago — even though about half of seniors were failing then. He assured educators statewide that things would improve.
"I said, 'Don't panic. If we stick to our guns, and our students believe they can do it, over 90 percent with credits will graduate,' " he said.
Other factors he said the state has put in place to help struggling students include less lag time between testing day and release of the results to allow for summer remediation, allotting $10 million for free tutoring for students, and individualized booklets that gave students a better idea what concept areas they needed to pass.
But critics have pointed out that AIMS test questions were made easier and the graduation requirements were pushed back, which they say has led to the improved numbers, rather than increased student success.
On StarNet: See AIMS scores for all Arizona schools at azstarnet.com/education
● Number of high school seniors in Arizona: 63,379
● Number of seniors expected to have completed course requirements: 48,952
● Number of seniors who have passed AIMS: 46,015
● Number of seniors who have failed AIMS but completed course requirements: 2,937
● Number of seniors expected to have not completed course requirements: 14,787
