Arizona received some bad news when the smart state ranking was released on Tuesday. The state ranked 50 for the second year in a row.

Arizona was preceded by Nevada, Mississippi, California and Alaska. At the top was Vermont in the number one spot, followed by Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey and Maine.

In a press release president of Morgan Quitno Press, Scott Morgan said, "Vermont performs very well in a number of important areas of education. A high percentage of the state's students are proficient in reading and math. In addition, class sizes are small and the number of teachers per student is among the lowest in the nation."

The study, compiled by private Kansas research company Morgan Quitno Press, uses information from each state's elementary and secondary school indicators. The 21 indicators used are things like test scores, teacher's pay, graduation rates and class size.