A little bit of everything
Vouchers, visas, vasectomies … Juggling impulses … And there’s a lot of ways to win.
With so much going on in the education world this week, we’re going to do a lightning round of the big stories in today’s edition.
We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get into it.
Back in the spotlight
After a brief hiatus, Arizona’s school voucher program is back on center stage.
The Republican lawmakers who support the program didn’t spend much time talking about it this legislative session. But over the last few weeks, the program has popped back up as a big political issue.
GOP lawmakers floated the idea of tying the renewal of Proposition 123, which provides $300 million annually to public schools and expires this year, to a measure that would enshrine school choice in the state constitution.
That plan appears to have stagnated, at least for now.
But vouchers are all set to be the main issue in the GOP primary race for state superintendent of public instruction.
Superintendent Tom Horne supports vouchers, but not enough to satisfy state Sen. Jake Hoffman, who led the charge to get Treasurer Kimberly Yee to challenge Horne next year.
Horne took some heat when he refused to honor requests from parents who wanted to use voucher money to buy a $5,000 Rolex watch, expensive musical instruments, and even a vasectomy testing kit.
Yee has placed school choice front and center in her nascent campaign, saying she was “proud of the school choice opportunities we’ve had” on KTAR’s The Mike Broomhead Show.
“We have a growing home school population in Arizona. More and more children are also going to those types of schools that fit their unique and individual needs — whether it’s a private school, a tribal school, a home school — and the ESA program in Arizona has allowed for that to happen,” Yee said.
On the other side of the aisle, five Democrats have already lined up to run for the office next year, as our sister newsletter the Arizona Agenda reported.
While all this is going on in Arizona, the federal government might inject a lot of money into states’ voucher programs.
The federal budget bill that’s being debated in Congress and the Senate right now would make $5 billion in tax credits available for vouchers across the country.
Stuck in the arena
The Trump administration’s attack on Harvard took a new turn last month, when the Department of Justice quietly opened an investigation into claims that The Harvard Law Review, one of the most prestigious legal journals in the country, discriminates against white men.
Federal lawyers say they have a cooperating witness inside the Law Review, which is run by students and operates independently of Harvard University.
In what would normally be an odd turn of events, the White House hired that witness, Daniel Wasserman, last month and he now works for Stephen Miller, Trump’s chief attack dog on immigration and other domestic policies.
Another of the many fronts the Trump administration has opened against Harvard involves barring international students.
But a federal judge in Boston ruled last week that Harvard could continue enrolling international students for the time being.
The announcement of the ruling came as Harvard was holding its commencement ceremony, where Harvard President Alan Garber earned a standing ovation when he saluted students “from down the street, across the country and around the world. Around the world. Just as it should be."
Watching from the sidelines
While Harvard takes the brunt of the Trump administration’s onslaught, universities across the country are watching and waiting.
Universities in Arizona appear to be taking steps to ensure they don’t upset the president, although that might not be enough.
Arizona universities still could take a hit as federal officials start to “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students,” as Secretary of State Marco Rubio put it. The University of Arizona has more than 600 Chinese students enrolled and Arizona State University has more than 2,600.
After the Trump administration demanded universities end all DEI-related programs, the UA merged all its cultural centers last week, including African American Student Affairs, the LGBTQ+2S Resource Center, and five others, the Tucson Sentinel’s Paul Ingram reported. The new center is called Campus Community Connections.
The UA also closed down its website that offered resources to Dreamers and immigrant families with mixed status, and removed “committed to diversity and inclusion” from the university’s land acknowledgement.
Over at ASU, a researcher spoke to KJZZ’s Mark Brodie about watching federal officials cut her $1.5 million grant.
Liliana Caughman/KJZZLiliana Caughman was co-leading a research project that helped Indigenous and Latine graduate students enter STEM fields when she was told her grant no longer aligned with the National Science Foundation’s priorities.
“We had to fire people, people lost salaries. We had to cancel all of our plans for this summer, so it was very fast and very complete,” Caughman told KJZZ.
Meanwhile, Democratic lawmakers and students want protection from the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education, the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy reports.
They rallied at the state Capitol on Monday to persuade lawmakers to better fund public universities in the upcoming state budget and push back on the vilification of international and LGBTQ students, at a time when federal officials are planning to cut Pell grants and threatening to cut funding to schools that offer DEI programs.
Help us boost our funding before the Trump administration figures out we’re fans of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Budget busters: The Joint Legislative Audit Committee is meeting Friday to dive into the finances of the Isaac Elementary School District and Tolleson Union High School district. Isaac was put into a rare “receivership” status, with an appointed finance guru attempting to right its troubled budget, while the neighboring Tolleson district stepped in to help with a $25 million lease-purchase agreement to acquire one of Isaac’s schools.
Balance your books, or else: In other Isaac Elementary-related news, the state House approved HB2610, that would require school board members resign if their district gets into such financial trouble that it’s placed in receivership, Arizona Capitol Times’ Jakob Thorington reported. The bill already passed the Senate and appears to be aimed squarely at districts that end up like the Isaac district, which overspent its budget by $20 million. That bill must return to the House for final approval.
Suing teachers: The state Senate passed HB2867, that would allow lawsuits that claim teachers are teaching or promoting antisemitism, the Arizona Capitol Times’ Jamar Younger reported. The Arizona Education Association is loudly opposing the bill, which they say would make teachers “vulnerable to bad-faith lawsuits from outside groups and political extremists,” the association wrote in an op-ed in the Daily Independent. The bill also has to go back to the House for final approval before heading to the governor.
Juggling act: The Republican Party is “juggling two impulses on education,” teacher and Substacker Billy Robb1 writes in the Cholla Express: The impulse to innovate with school choice and AI, and the impulse to Make Education Great Again with religion and anti-gay rhetoric. Elsewhere in the Cholla Express, Robb argues that Arizona should lean into former Gov. Doug Ducey’s “American Civics Act” — which requires high school students to pass the citizenship test — by replacing the memorization-based test with an Arizona-specific test and a new civics curriculum that promotes real-world participation.
Setting limits: Gov. Katie Hobbs is still not a fan of the school voucher program. She told KTAR’s “Outspoken with Bruce and Gaydos” that she wants to see income limits on who can use vouchers, and she was worried about the program’s impact on rural areas.
“They don’t have the same educational choice opportunities that the kids in Paradise Valley who are using these vouchers have,” Hobbs said. “And so, it just takes funding out of the public school that they have access to and then they don’t have the same opportunity as other students.”
Thanks to this week’s sponsor, Education Forward Arizona! We dig their newsletter. You can sign up for it here.
The administration’s education overhaul poses a serious threat to Arizona’s students, schools, and economy.
A wave of federal actions — including executive orders and budget proposals — could dismantle the support systems students rely on to pursue college, technical training, and career advancement.
Programs like GEAR UP, TRIO, and Public Service Loan Forgiveness aren’t extras — they are essential lifelines for students from low-income, rural, English learner, and first-generation backgrounds.
Education Forward Arizona is sounding the alarm: Without urgent action, these fragmented federal decisions could derail educational progress and widen opportunity gaps across the state.
The stakes are especially high in Arizona, where financial aid is limited, and public schools are already underfunded. Arizona’s future workforce and postsecondary attainment goals hang in the balance.
In this article, Education Forward Arizona breaks down what’s at risk — and why the state must act now to protect its students and economy.
If you’d like to sponsor an edition of the Education Agenda, get in touch!
A tip of the hat to all four Arizona students who made it to the Scripps National Spelling Bee last week.
And a big congrats to Esha Marupudi, a seventh-grader from BASIS School-Chandler, who finished tied for seventh place.
During the finals, she nailed words that even computer spell-checkers don’t recognize, like “emulgent” and ”anthrarufin.”
And over at Arizona State University, students are learning how to build underwater robots, KTAR’s Shira Tanzer reports. This week, they’re getting ready to compete in the National Underwater Robotics Challenge.
But first, they have to figure out how to make GPS work underwater.
And if that name sounds familiar, it might be you’re thinking of his father, Robert Robb, a former Republic columnist who now also pens a newsletter. They do a fun occasional podcast together.