Summary:
ZIP code 85339 has two high schools, Cesar Chavez High School and Betty Fairfax High School, both serving grades 9–12 in the Phoenix Union High School District. Their reported proficiency results are close to one another, but both schools are substantially below state results: the two-school average is 21% in all-grades ELA versus 41% statewide, and 17% in math versus 33%. The most important finding is that both schools have large proficiency gaps compared with the state.
Betty Fairfax High School is the proficiency leader across all five reported measures, while Cesar Chavez High School has the lower results. Betty Fairfax leads by 2 percentage points in all-grades ELA and math and in 11th-grade ELA and math; its science result is 11%, compared with 7% at Cesar Chavez, a 4-point lead. Still, Betty Fairfax remains below the state in every measure—for example, its 11th-grade science result is 8 points below the state’s 19%. Completion figures favor Cesar Chavez: its graduation rate is 84% versus 82% at Betty Fairfax, and its dropout rate is 3% versus 4%.
SchoolDigger rankings improved for both schools in the latest reported year, but that does not show that test scores improved over time. Cesar Chavez’s percentile moved from 10 to 8 to 18 between 2023–24 and 2025–26; Betty Fairfax’s went from 24 to 18 to 23. The two-school average rose from 17 to 21 over that span. For families weighing school characteristics, Cesar Chavez has more students (2,598 versus 2,014) and a lower student–teacher ratio (20.2 versus 22.3), yet Betty Fairfax has higher proficiency results. Listed per-student spending was $8,638 at Cesar Chavez and $9,473 at Betty Fairfax, but those figures are from 2021–22. These details describe differences between the schools but do not explain their results.
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