Good morning, Education Agenda readers!

It was an interesting week in education.

We’ll dive into a report that shows how much money school officials are making (it’s a lot).

We also found an interview that finally sheds some light on the Trump administration’s strategy for going after universities.

And we didn’t forget about the civics quiz you all took last week. (Don’t worry, everybody passed.)

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A school district superintendent’s job isn’t easy, that’s for sure.

We’ve seen more than a few age before our eyes as they deal with complex finances, teachers’ unions, unruly parents, and lawmakers who want to dictate what happens in classrooms.

Still, it turns out superintendents in Arizona are making a lot more money than you might think, according to a report from the Goldwater Institute.

Researchers at Goldwater haggled with school officials for months to get records and came away with a database of salaries, bonuses, and perks for 41 of Arizona’s largest districts.

Researchers found the average base pay for superintendents in Arizona was about $215,000.

But superintendents’ compensation climbed quickly once you include monthly car allowances, retirement packages (on top of their state pensions) and vacation pay.

Those perks helped push the salary of Jeremy Calles, superintendent at Tolleson Union High School District, up to nearly $500,000. That was the highest in the state, but a number of other superintendents are clearing well over $300,000.

The Goldwater Institute said districts should simplify pay structures and post superintendent contracts online. That would make it easy for the public to know how much their local superintendent gets paid, and it would save researchers (and reporters) the hassle of trying to track down public records.

It’s worth noting that the Goldwater Institute isn’t the biggest fan of public schools in general. It often promotes school choice instead. But these are taxpayer dollars we’re talking about and the report is worth a look.

As we’ve watched Trump officials target the Ivy League and then move on to public universities in the Midwest, we’ve been wondering when they’ll get to Arizona’s universities.

We’ve also been trying to understand exactly why they’re going after higher education in the first place.

Trump officials have thrown out ideas like combating anti-semitism on campuses, eliminating racism against white students and trying to thwart liberal professors.

But they haven’t presented a coherent argument backed up by examples. Instead, it looks like a jumbled revenge campaign, akin to Trump lashing out at news outlets, TV networks or law firms.

Not anymore.

May Mailman, the architect of the Trump administration’s strategy on higher education, left government recently and did a kind of exit interview with Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist with the New York Times.

Finally, we have some sort of intellectual framework to understand what the Trump administration is doing.

Douthat himself seemed excited to hear what Mailman had to say.

He considers the Trump administration’s attempt to change “the way big universities admit students, hire faculty members, handle free-speech debates and much more” as the most significant part of the administration’s effort to “push America’s cultural institutions to the right.”

During their hour-long talk, Mailman described what she viewed as a “glorification of victimhood” on campuses and held up Hillsdale College, a conservative college in Michigan that doesn’t take any federal funding, as a model for other universities.

She also said the hundreds of millions of dollars Ivy League schools paid to settle with Trump showed a “sense of acknowledgment of wrongdoing” and urged other universities to “get in early, before the fines are too large.”

Even though Douthat mostly agrees with Mailman, he pushes back at times, like when Mailman claims the Trump administration actually did any kind of investigation before cracking down on universities.

If you want some insight into what the Trump administration is trying to do to higher education, take some time to watch this interview or read the transcript.

Last week, we asked you to test your civics knowledge, in light of the decline in civics education across the country.

So how’d you do?

Not bad! More than 80 of you answered the 10-question quiz, and you did pretty well.

Everybody knew Katie Hobbs was the governor of Arizona, for example, and that the Soviet Union was the United States’ chief rival during the Cold War.

And nearly everybody nailed that there are 435 voting members in the U.S. House of Representatives. Three of you got tripped up by a different choice, 279. It tends to stick in people’s minds because it’s the number of Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency.

Likewise, a few of you picked William Rehnquist as the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. That’s not a bad guess. Rehnquist was the chief justice until he died 20 years ago. The current chief justice is John Roberts.

You also did really well naming Mike Johnson as the Speaker of the House. All but two of you got the right answer.

But more than a few people had a hard time figuring out some of the other questions.

Nearly everybody knew that all women got the right to vote in 1920, but one-third of you had trouble with the same question for men.

The correct answer was 1870, when the 15th Amendment granted Black men the right to vote after the Civil War.

And a dozen people guessed wrong on the meaning of “E Pluribus Unum,” the country’s first motto. It means “Out of many, one,” but some people picked “In God we trust” or “Power to the people” (nobody picked the fourth choice, “Make America Great Again”).

As for how many constitutional amendments there are, three-quarters of you picked the right answer, 27. That’s not bad, really. Amendment-related info is hard to remember.

For example, nearly one-third of you didn’t know that the 22nd Amendment was the one that said a president could only serve two terms.

If you’re curious and want to learn more about the Constitution, we stumbled across this great teaching tool at the National Archives. You can find all kinds of historical documents, and they created games to make it more fun (although you might have to wait until the government shutdown is over and the National Archives website is fully operational again).

Hospitality lessons: The push to get public school officials in Arizona to adopt restaurant-style customer service practices and advertising tactics is gaining steam, the Wall Street Journal reports. Public schools are trying to ward off enrollment declines due to competition from charter schools, the state’s school voucher program and declining birth rates. They also get dragged through the mud in political debates.

Cutting class: Arizona high schoolers aren’t missing as many days of school as they did during the height of the Covid pandemic, but absenteeism is still higher than before the pandemic, the Republic’s Erick Trevino reports. In the 2023-2024 school year, 34% of high school students were chronically absent, meaning they missed at least 10% of school days, according to a new report from the Helios Education Foundation. Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne called the findings “catastrophic” and highlighted the Dysart School District, which has an absenteeism rate of just 9%. Horne said the district was able to keep absenteeism low by forcing students to repeat a grade if they missed too many days.

Thanks, but no thanks: The good news at the University of Arizona is they dug themselves out of a financial hole from 2023, which led to big bonuses for UA President Suresh Garimella, the Republic’s Helen Rummel reports. The bad news is enrollment of first-year students at the UA dropped 19% this fall, largely from declines in out-of-state and international students, per the Arizona Daily Star’s Prerana Sannappanavar. The UA cut financial aid for out-of-state students over the last few years, and the Trump administration harassed thousands of international students across the country this Spring. Nationwide, the biggest decline came from students from India, who dropped by 50%.

Election season is upon us: The two biggest names in next year’s race for Arizona superintendent of public instruction are battling over whether a small district in Maricopa County should get an advance payment of state money, the Arizona Capitol Times’ Kiera Riley reports. Horne says the Nadaburg Unified School District should get $3 million to offset a budget deficit, but Treasurer Kimberly Yee claims the deficit may have been the result of “gross financial mismanagement.”

Sure, why not?: Famed rapper Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas is going to teach Arizona State University students about artificial intelligence at his Hollywood studio, the Phoenix New Times’ Cheyla Daverman reports. The class will be called “The Agentic Self” and students will build an AI universal companion they can keep for the rest of their education and professional careers, per ASU News.

As a first-of-its-kind statewide town hall on the future of education in Arizona, Inside the Issues: Education Solutions for Arizona brought together leaders, educators, and community members for an honest look at the challenges and opportunities facing students from preschool through college.

Hosted by the Arizona Clean Elections Commission, the Arizona Media Foundation, the Arizona Local News Foundation, and Reister — and guided by respected local journalists — the event explored Arizona’s most pressing education issues, from early childhood through K–12 and postsecondary.

On the Postsecondary Education panel, Education Forward Arizona President and CEO Rich Nickel emphasized the need to expand pathways and opportunities for students after high school. His perspective helped ground the discussion in solutions that prepare learners not just for college, but for careers and life.

To learn more about the critical education issues shaping Arizona — and to see the in-depth, nonpartisan conversation for yourself — watch the full segment above.

Creativity is flowing through the halls of Pueblo High School in Tucson.

Students at Pueblo run their own radio station, 98.7 The Block, where they learn how to write scripts, host shows, craft playlists and all the other tasks behind putting on a radio broadcast, the Arizona Luminaria’s Shannon Conner reports.

The Block is the only high school radio station in Southern Arizona, and it’s also one of the programs Tucson Unified School District officials point to as they make their pitch to voters to approve a budget override in November.