Tom Horne on Jan. 13, 2025, in the Arizona House of Representatives. Photo by Gage Skidmore | Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0
Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne’s wish list for Arizona schools includes more armed security, no transgender athletes and less focus on racial differences.
During his State of Education address on Tuesday, Horne, a Republican who is in his second stint as state schools chief, thanked the legislators on the Arizona House of Representatives Education Committee for their work last week to forward a bill to the full House that would free up funding to pay retired police officers to protect schools.
“Saying you want a gun-free school is like saying you are an easy victim, ‘Come get me,’” Horne told the committee.
Horne commended the school resource officer who apprehended a man armed with a gun and a knife inside a Tucson charter school last week, where 20 students and multiple staff members were present.
If the school resource officer hadn’t been there, Horne said, “Twenty students and additional adults would have lost their lives, and the students’ parents would have had their lives ruined by uncontrollable grief.”
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Both Horne and GOP Rep. Matt Gress, the chairman of the committee, urged Democrats who say guns don’t belong in schools to rethink their positions. Gress referred to arguments made by Democrats on the committee last week who said they would like to see more funding for counselors and social workers in schools instead of or in addition to police officers.
“There couldn’t have been enough counselors or social workers to have helped that individual at that moment, as an intruder who was on campus, right?” Gress asked.
Horne said he agreed and that additional counselors would have been killed.
Philosophical issues
During his speech on Tuesday, Horne also touched on other contentious political issues — the supposed teaching of critical race theory in public schools and the rights of transgender students — which he described as “philosophical differences.”
Horne said he believes in the “traditional American value of individual merit” instead of acknowledging and accommodating the different backgrounds and experiences of students from different cultures and races.
“Focus on racial preferences does not do anything to encourage hard work, conscientiousness or creativity,” Horne said. “If our country were to adopt that philosophy, we would become a mediocre third-world nation and China would call the shots in the world.”
Nearly 20 years ago, during his first stint as superintendent of public instruction, Horne was behind a ban on ethnic studies in public schools that was later found to be unconstitutional and rooted in racism.
There is no evidence that critical race theory, a college-level academic concept that explores the social structures that create and support racism, is being taught in Arizona’s K-12 public schools, and public educators have repeatedly said it isn’t being taught in schools here.
Transgender athletes
“Biological males have no business in girls sports, showers or locker rooms,” Horne told the Education Committee. “News sources are filled with stories about girls who work hard to be qualified for a team, maybe get a scholarship, maybe even try for the Olympics, and then have their dreams shattered when they had to compete against the biological male with the advantages of male muscularship.”
That isn’t true. In 2023, a spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union told Newsweek that only five transgender middle and high school athletes who compete on girls teams had been identified in the entire United States, although privacy laws prevent reporting of the exact number.
And the Associated Press reported in 2021, that Republicans who backed transgender athlete bans had a difficult time pointing to local instances of other girls being pushed aside by trans girls on their team.
When Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat who is responsible for defending state laws in court, refused to do so for a law banning transgender girls from sports, Horne instead stepped in to defend the law, alongside Senate President Warren Petersen.
The law, passed by Republicans in the Legislature in 2022, was found to be unconstitutional and is currently blocked by a federal appeals court while a lawsuit challenging it moves forward.
Students, teachers and academics
Horne acknowledged on Tuesday that the two major goals outlined in his State of Education speech last year had still not come to fruition.
In last year’s address, Horne’s priorities were increased pay — but only for teachers, not support staff — and harsher discipline for students who misbehave.
At the time, Horne said that both of these policies would help improve teacher retention by making them feel more supported.
But Republicans’ plan to increase teacher pay failed to make it to the finish line last year, as did Horne’s proposal to pressure school districts to dole out more severe punishments. Neither garnered bipartisan support, which Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs has made clear is a requirement for her to consider signing legislation instead of vetoing it.
Horne said that renewing Proposition 123 was essential to his continued plan to bump up teacher pay.
In 2015, Arizona voters approved Prop. 123, increasing from 2.5% to 6.9% the distribution from the State Land Trust that goes to K-12 education. But that extra money is set to expire at the end of June. Hobbs and the Republicans who control the Legislature have been squabbling over the past year or so about when to put a Prop. 123 renewal to voters and at what distribution percentage.
No bilingual education
Horne also doubled down on his commitment to fight bilingual education for K-12 students who are learning English language learners.
Last year, a judge tossed Horne’s lawsuit aimed at shutting down dual-language instruction at Arizona schools after he contended that it violated Arizona law.
In the 50-50 Dual Language Immersion teaching model used in some Arizona schools, students learn half the day in English and the other half in another language, such as Spanish.
Horne, who has long opposed dual-language instruction, claims that the dual language model violates Proposition 203 — approved by voters more than 20 years ago — which mandates English-only instruction and requires a parental waiver before bilingual methods can be taught.
Horne claims that English comprehension improved drastically for English language learners when he began enforcing the English-immersion teaching model during his first two terms as schools chief, from 2002 through 2010.
However, an investigation by the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Justice Department found that, from 2006 to 2012, thousands of Arizona students were incorrectly promoted from ELL programs — or were never identified as English learners in the first place — because of changes in scoring that the Arizona Department of Education made to English proficiency tests.
And Rep. Brian Garcia, D-Tempe, told Horne on Tuesday that he was one of the English-immersion students who was not well-served by that teaching model.
According to his campaign website, Garcia grew up in Arizona with parents from El Salvador and Mexico. Garcia, who spoke Spanish at home when he was growing up, said that he had to teach himself English grammar while he was in law school.
Vouchers
Horne said he will continue to defend the state’s universal school voucher program, formally known as the Empowerment Scholarship Account program.
When the voucher program was created in 2012, it served a small number of students who met specific criteria. Republicans in the Legislature, along with Gov. Doug Ducey, expanded the program in 2022 to apply to any K-12 child, regardless of parent income. Students who participate receive a voucher to pay private school tuition, to use for homeschooling or to save for college tuition.
Before the universal expansion, the voucher program served around 12,000 students, but now there are more than 83,000 students enrolled, according to the Department of Education, with a total budget of almost $1 billion.
The program has come under attack from Democrats and public school advocates who have described it as an entitlement program for wealthy parents, many of them with children who were attending private school prior to receiving a voucher.
Republicans, on the other hand, have praised the program as a national model for school choice.
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