by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Mar 28, 2025 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs and the Radical Left have made it clear that they want to dismantle school choice in our state. Despite getting trounced in November’s election where teachers’ unions and other anti-school choice groups made it a referendum on educational freedom, Hobbs has doubled down on her same tired and out-of-touch efforts since the start of this year.
Once again, it hasn’t worked. Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program continues to grow—with enrollment now over 87,000 students. So, Hobbs and her buddies in the teachers’ unions have resorted to employing one of their favorite tricks: relying on activist reporters in the corporate media to give their anti-school choice messaging an extra boost.
In early March, a coordinated attack was launched against Primavera, an online charter school serving thousands of K-12 students across the state. It began with a story from Craig Harris, a Red4ED activist that calls himself a reporter, who claimed that Primavera received a ‘D’ letter grade from the Arizona Department of Education for the past three years. According to the report, the school failed to meet the minimum academic requirements for a traditional charter school. Harris’ column then went on to complain about the owner of Primavera and how much money he has made while operating the school.
After the story was published, the Arizona Charter School Board convened a hearing to review the allegations against Primavera. In a span of just a few hours, the board imposed the most severe punishment at their disposal, revoking the schools’ charter and setting them up for eventual closure. In effect, Primavera was given the charter school death penalty after one meeting.
On the surface, this might make sense. After all, if a school is failing its students, it deserves proper accountability. But as so often happens with today’s corporate media, an important fact was omitted from this manufactured takedown…
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by Terri Jo Neff | Jul 21, 2021 | News
By Terri Jo Neff |
Last week the Arizona Republic published a five-part series by news reporter Craig Harris which suggested something improper occurred when Gov. Doug Ducey’s office was consulted about a tax challenge filed by Carter Oil with the Arizona Department of Revenue (ADOR).
CJ Karamargin, for one, was not impressed.
Which matters, because Karamargin is Ducey’s director of communications. He is also a former journalist, having worked for the Arizona Daily Star and Tucson Citizen.
So when Karamargin took to Twitter on Sunday with a 10-part critique of Harris’ series, people listened. The critique used words such as conjecture and innuendo. And that was among some of his nicer comments.
“No one I’ve talked to can understand the story or reporting. Probably because it doesn’t make sense and doesn’t get basic facts right,” Karamargin wrote in tweet #1. One of those incorrect facts, he tweeted, is that someone named in the article as being a former employee had never worked for Ducey.
“When a reporter can’t even get names right, you’ve got a problem,” he wrote in tweet #3.
Karamargin also points out that some of the former public servants who provided information to Harris were in fact “disgruntled former employees” of the state whom the newspaper had previously reported about.
Once he got to tweet #5, Karamargin was on a roll.
“The accusations are false,” he wrote about suggestions in the articles that state officials considered a settlement in the ADOR tax challenge because someone connected to the matter could potentially be helpful to Ducey in a possible presidential run.
“Losing the case in court would have caused a ripple effect, impacting many more industries and businesses,” Karamargin wrote. “This would not only have had a significant impact on these businesses — it would have had a much more significant impact on state revenue than settling.”
In the end, there was no settlement with Carter Oil because the Arizona Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the state.
“So this story is about something that did not happen,” tweet #8 says. Then Karamargin did a little explaining about how things work in the executive branch of state government.
“Our office does not lobby state agencies; they report to us. Agency directors aren’t free agents…And they do not make decisions that have potentially 100s of millions of $ in impact to the state without consulting us.”
One of those named throughout Harris’ series is Carlton Woodruff, who was removed by Ducey as ADOR’s director in December. Woodruff’s departure amid a disagreement with the governor’s office over how to respond to a court challenge to Prop 208, the Invest in Education Act. The only comments at the time came from Karamargin.
“The role of state agencies is not to take policy positions but to implement the law,” he said, adding that Woodruff’s removal was “unrelated” to how the Carter Oil tax challenge was handled.
