Not pulling punches
Judge doesn’t hold back … Digging into the data … And we won’t win the Spelling Be.
When the president said in March that he wanted to dismantle the Department of Education, it threw the education world for a loop.
Could the Trump administration just get rid of a federal department? How could they justify firing half the department’s staff?
Most importantly, what was going to happen to school districts that depend on federal dollars, or kids who had to leave public school because of racist bullying?
Given the high stakes, a lot of people sued, including attorneys general in Arizona and 20 other states, along with teachers’ unions and school districts.
Last week, we got answers to the questions President Donald Trump left dangling in March.
And it wasn’t pretty, at least for the Trump team.
A federal judge in Massachusetts heard the arguments from the Trump administration about why the massive staff cuts were necessary and what the administration was trying to do.
“None of these statements amount to a reasoned explanation, let alone an explanation at all,” the judge wrote.
It got worse from there.
The 88-page ruling from U.S. District Judge Myong J. Joun read like a middle-school teacher grading a book report that obviously was written the night before it was due.
In the end, Joun, a Biden appointee, blocked the Trump administration from cutting the department’s workforce by half, which he said would have stopped the department from completing the duties set by Congress.
He also blocked the administration from moving services, like protecting the rights of special needs students or handling the student loan portfolio, to other federal departments.
For now, all the department employees who were fired as a result of the March order can go back to work.
But Joun’s ruling wasn’t the end of the argument. Not by a long shot.
Conservative activists have pushed to dismantle the department for decades, including in the Project 2025 blueprint. And they’re sure to come up with new arguments in the coming months to get rid of the department.
But those arguments will have to be a lot more convincing than the ones they presented to Joun.
Plainly not true
One of the sticking points for Joun was a pattern that’s become all too familiar as Trump lobs executive orders: his public statements don’t match the arguments his lawyers make in court.
Trump publicly said in his March order that he would “begin eliminating the federal Department of Education.”
But when it came time to defend the order in court, federal lawyers argued the staff cuts didn’t have anything to do with eliminating the department.
Instead, they said, it was all about making the department more efficient.
Joun didn’t buy it, saying the administration’s argument that this was just a reorganization is “plainly not true.”
“The record abundantly reveals that Defendants’ true intention is to effectively dismantle the Department without an authorizing statute,” Joun wrote.
He hammered his point home, citing a dozen examples of Trump and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon publicly saying they intended to dismantle the department.
That included Trump “referring to the Department as a ‘a big con job’ and saying he would ‘like to close it immediately,’” Joun wrote.
Red herrings
Earlier this year, when the Trump team threatened to pull billions of federal dollars from public schools that offered diversity, equity and inclusion programs, they argued no funds had been pulled back yet, so it was a case of “no harm, no foul.”
Judges didn’t buy it, but the Trump team still tried it again in the case overseen by Joun.
They argued that the Department of Education hasn’t actually closed, so the states, teachers unions and school districts haven’t been harmed yet.
Joun called it a “red herring,” saying Trump’s order incapacitated the department.
“A department without enough employees to perform statutorily mandated functions is not a department at all,” Joun wrote. “This court cannot be asked to cover its eyes while the Department’s employees are continuously fired and units are transferred out until the Department becomes a shell of itself.”
And, even if the department technically still exists, the states and schools already had been harmed by the drastic layoffs at the Department of Education, Joun wrote.
Among the many examples Joun pointed to were the firing of officials who conduct oversight on federal spending, university students who can’t plan without knowing whether they’ll get financial aid, and schools cutting staff due to the uncertainty of federal funding.
More poignantly, Joun highlighted the case of a 12-year-old student in Nebraska who suffered racial slurs and physical assaults, including one where teachers found him “crying in the fetal position” after a student pushed him to the ground and “stomped on his head.”
His mother pulled him out of public school and the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into how the school dealt with the situation.
But the Trump administration fired the officials who investigate these types of cases. Now, there’s nobody to process the mother’s complaint and the boy can’t return to a public school that failed to protect him.
After Joun’s ruling, Trump officials showed no signs of backing down.
In fact, a spokesman for the Department of Education, Madi Biedermann, had some harsh words ready for Joun.
“President Trump and the Senate-confirmed Secretary of Education clearly have the authority to make decisions about agency reorganization efforts, not an unelected Judge with a political axe to grind,” Biedermann wrote in a statement to ABC News.
Biedermann said the Trump administration “will immediately challenge this on an emergency basis.”
When they do, we’ll be right there covering it for you.
The big reveal: For months, legislative Freedom Caucus leader Jake Hoffman has been teasing his recruitment of a GOP challenger to take on Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne from the right. Hoffman is holding a press conference on the Capitol lawn at 9:30 this morning to reveal his chosen candidate. (It’s almost definitely State Treasurer Kimberly Yee.)
Digging deep: It’s great when a veteran reporter takes a deep dive into data. 12News reporter Craig Harris is plowing through Arizona’s school voucher program. Last week, he shined a light on the fact that high-performing public schools, not the “failing” ones, are losing tons of students to the voucher program. This week, he’s highlighting the fact that vouchers aren’t exactly leveling the economic playing field for public education. Many of the vouchers are being used by students in wealthy neighborhoods, like Paradise Valley, where the median home value is $3 million.
Another deep dive: International students were in the spotlight this spring when the Trump administration revoked thousands of visas. Now Trump is going after international students at Harvard. The Washington Post took a deep dive into which universities have the most international students, how much money they bring in, and what fields they study. That includes more than 18,000 international students at Arizona State University, the fourth-highest total in the country, and 4,500 at the University of Arizona.
Local kids staying local: A new state law is aimed at keeping graduates of medical schools and nursing programs in Arizona, KTAR’s Shira Tanzer reports. Nationwide, about 40% of pre-med students leave the state they were trained in. Gov. Katie Hobbs signed a bill (which popped up in a roundup of new laws we did a few weeks ago) from state Sen. Carine Werner that requires Arizona pre-med programs to give interviews to any qualified Arizona resident.
“They have to be able to earn that spot through the interview, but at least they got a seat at the table to begin with. And … our hope is that they will ultimately get more students who are from here and if they are from here, they’re more likely to stay here after medical school,” Werner told KTAR.
Tough crowd: Parents in Scottsdale aren’t happy that a book they say glorifies the Black Lives Matter movement will be taught in local social studies classes, the Scottsdale Progress’ Tom Scanlon reports. A dozen critics blasted the Scottsdale Unified School District Governing Board at a recent meeting for including the “U.S. History Interactive” publication, along with materials that one parent said teach children that they “can change their sex, or that they can be neither a boy nor a girl, that police are inherently harmful, and that America is systemically racist.”
Turning hobbies into jobs: Several Arizona high schools are helping students realize their dreams of making a living by working with video games, KJZZ’s George Headley reports. At the American Leadership Academy Applied Technologies, the school invested a half-million dollars in what they call “Gaming Careers.” Students learn about the technology behind the games, how to design them, and how to run events.
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Digging up dirt: Now that the Legislature pumped more money into investigators for the Arizona State Board of Education, the number of educators being disciplined is rising, ABC15’s Elenee Dao reports. Their annual report showed more than 1,800 investigations last year, which led to 325 enforcement actions. That’s a rise from 272 enforcement actions in 2023.
This week, four Arizona students are going to take the stage for Curt’s favorite academic challenge: The Scripps National Spelling Bee.
Spelling isn’t just putting letters in the right order. It’s an art form. You have to read anything you can get your hands on, understand root words and conjugations, use clues from the language of origin, and so much more.
Arizona’s Family highlighted the students who earned their spot on the stage in Washington, D.C.:
Esha Marupudi, a seventh-grader from BASIS School-Chandler.
Salman Rashid, a sixth-grader from Jack. W. Harmon Elementary School in San Tan Valley.
Sumukh Tirumalasetty, a fourth-grader from New Vistas Academy in Chandler.
Christopher Werito, an eighth-grader at Tsaile Elementary School on the Navajo Nation.
Good luck to all four of you!