During the Covid lockdown, many Arizona parents, like parents throughout the country, became aware of what their children were learning via Zoom lessons and did not like it. Soon thereafter, those parents attended school board meetings to express their disgust that their children’s instruction included critical race theory, Black Lives Matter propaganda, gender reassignment, early sex education, and other radical ideas. Meanwhile, their children’s reading and math scores remained dismally low. A disconnect had developed between what the parents wanted for their children and what the teachers were providing.
Fortunately, Tom Horne, former State Superintendent from 2003 to 2011, decided to run for State Superintendent for a third term to stop the madness, in spite of the fact that he would have to give up his law practice should he win. He realized he was the only one who could end critical race theory instruction, as he had done before, improve achievement, as he had done before, and force schools to teach English to immigrant children, in accordance with the law, as he also had done before.
AS State Superintendent, Tom Horne worked with the legislature to outlaw the Tucson “ethnic studies” program based on CRT. By proving himself serious about taking over Roosevelt district schools due to low achievement, he motivated those schools to improve their instruction so drastic action was no longer necessary. He enforced the mandate to teach immigrant children English through immersion instruction, instead of bilingual education, raising the students’ yearly rate of English proficiency from 4 to 29 percent.
Tom Horne took Horne vs. Flores all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2009 and won, based on the evidence that Nogales schools had not failed students due to a lack of funding, as claimed in the original lawsuit, but because of the district’s longtime bilingual education program. With that he ended the million-dollar daily fines that had been imposed upon our state for not resolving the issue.
Unfortunately, Tom Horne’s successors did not maintain many of the successes that he had worked so hard to achieve. They meant well but they lacked ability and experience.
Tom Horne, on the other hand, had proven himself a strong leader as early as the 1990s. While Horne was president of the Paradise Valley Unified School District Board, the district was able to attract good teachers because of that district’s above-average salary schedule and good student discipline. Tom Krebs, the PVUSD superintendent at the time, considered Horne the one most responsible for those improvements. He had reduced district costs to 2.7 percent of the budget by consolidating district services to their “bare bone” and had encouraged programs that took disruptive students out of the classroom.
Tom Horne is the right person to end the harm that AZ Superintendent Kathy Hoffman has caused to our children by imposing her radical ideology on them. We must replace Hoffman with Tom Horne!
By Johanna J. Haver, author of Vindicated: Closing the Hispanic Achievement Gap Through English Immersion and former member of the Maricopa County Community College District (2015 to 2019).
