In a speech Tuesday extolling the second Trump administration’s education agenda, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon reflected on a news story she’d learned of a few months before she was sworn in.

The story was about a girl who had recently graduated from a Connecticut high school.

“She graduated with honors, earned a scholarship, and was starting college,” McMahon said. “But this same young woman — very, very bold young woman — decided to sue her local education board, alleging that she could not read or write.”

Those details sketch an almost perfect outline of the experiences of Aleysha Ortiz, who graduated from Hartford Public Schools in 2024 without knowing how to read. She sued the district not long after. The Connecticut Mirror profiled Ortiz in September of that year, and the story drew nationwide attention.

[RELATED: This Hartford Public High School grad can’t read. Here’s how it happened.]

McMahon offered her thoughts on what went wrong.

“This young lady’s school district has a budget of over $400 million. During her time there, the district employed about 1,800 non-teaching staff, such as a chief of talent and DEI,” McMahon said.

“The Biden administration devoted competitive grant funds to her district … to sponsor professional development surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion,” she added.

It all led to McMahon’s main point. The Trump administration has “taken billions away from DEI classroom initiatives and bureaucrat-centric projects and reinvested those dollars to supercharge the fundamentals: the ability to read well, write clearly, understand mathematics, and to think critically,” she said.

But Connecticut education leaders have a different diagnosis for what went wrong in Ortiz’s case.

Hartford’s budget is large, as are the needs the district must address. A state review recently found the district is facing a deficit of tens of millions of dollars, a problem many link to the lack of taxable property in the city. There was broad bipartisan support among lawmakers this year for increasing state funding to public schools to help mitigate the problem.

Hartford Public Schools Superintendent Andraé Townsel has spoken frequently about his district’s fiscal plight in the past. For this story, however, the district declined to comment due to Ortiz’s lawsuit, which is ongoing. So did the chairperson of Hartford’s board of education, Shontá Browdy.

Former Hartford Association of Teachers President Carol Gale was not so hesitant.

“That’s crazy,” Gale said after listening to McMahon’s take.

As president of the teachers union, Gale said, she was often critical of how many directors Hartford had on staff. But “even if you got rid of some of the excess directors … it wasn’t going to make up for the millions of deficits that the city is facing constantly,” she said.

Nor did she think there was any merit to the idea that DEI efforts had contributed to Ortiz not learning to read. She recalled the DEI-related executive McMahon mentioned but said the position only existed for a couple of years before being cut.

Hartford Mayor Arunan Arulampalam also took issue with McMahon’s comments.

“Instead of supporting the hard work happening in our classrooms every day, federal leaders are traveling the country and blaming the challenges of Hartford Public Schools on the diversity of our students — this is why the federal government is failing public schools in America,” Arulampalam said in a statement.

Luke Bronin, who was mayor of Hartford when Ortiz attended the city’s schools and is now running for Congress, expressed a similar sentiment.

“Linda McMahon is actively undermining public education, and she couldn’t care less about kids with special education needs. She’s literally dismantled the Department of Education and handed responsibility for special education to RFK Jr. — who has no business dealing with our health, let alone kids’ education,” Bronin said in a statement.

Connecticut State Department of Education spokesperson Matt Cerrone said Gov. Ned Lamont and the General Assembly have made “significant investments” in literacy instruction in recent years.

“Through initiatives such as the Science of Reading Masterclass, high-quality instructional materials, professional learning, and literacy coaching, we are providing educators across Connecticut with the tools, resources, and support they need to meet the needs of their students,” Cerrone said in a statement.

Gale, the former union leader, pointed to the expansion of school choice programming as partially responsible for funding shortfalls. “I am convinced that the rise of magnet schools has spread out the dollars way thinner,” she said.

Students who leave Hartford for choice programs — Capitol Region Education Council (CREC) schools, for example — take a portion of sorely-needed state funding with them, district leaders have said. Hartford hired a firm this spring to recruit students back from CREC but faced pushback for potentially violating the landmark civil rights case Sheff v. O’Neill in the process.

School choice also happens to be a major part of the Trump administration’s education agenda, albeit in a slightly different flavor. A signature piece of that effort is the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit, which uses federal dollars to support scholarships for a range of purposes from private school tuition to third-party tutoring. Lamont has not yet said whether he will opt Connecticut in.

McMahon made it clear in her speech Tuesday that expanding school choice is very much the point.

“Whatever a parent decides for their child, our country now affirms what should have always been evident: That that choice belongs to you,” McMahon said.

The current president of the Hartford Federation of Teachers, Corey Moses, criticized the tax credit as an effort to privatize schooling in America.

“Instead of exploiting a student that our system failed, the secretary should join us in advocating for the resources needed to ensure every student can grow, achieve and prosper throughout their lives,” he added.