The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Tom Horne, a bloviating blast from Arizona’s past who believes voters are amnesiacs, hopes to win back the state superintendency of public instruction from Democrat Kathy Hoffman with a cynical campaign based on culture war claptrap, critical race theory blather and salacious suggestions of grooming so he can vigorously revive the dismantling of public education.
Hoffman is a rational advocate for public education, defending it from Arizona’s far right, which has, in legislative session after session, vandalized public education, vilified teachers’ unions, driven out exceptional public school educators with onerous regulations, micromanaged content with asinine curricula and most destructive of all, cut and slashed public education’s financial throat year after year after year.
People are also reading…
Vouchers are key to their dream of privatizing public education. Vouchers rob you, Peter, the taxpaying public school parent, to pay for Paul’s choice to abandon public education, send “Precious” to St. Paul’s Academy for the Precocious and evade accountability.
While Arizona’s heroic public school teachers are left fundraising for pencils, public ed’s purse is being purloined by pickpockets like Uptown Jungle, an indoor playground fun park, in Peoria, that “now accepts ESA funds for unlimited playtime memberships.” Are you kidding me? While our exhausted public schools go begging we are subsidizing privately owned playtime palaces?
No one knows how private schools spend your public tax dollars as they offer their clientele legal segregation by income, class, religion or color, neatly evading the greater burden of educating the challenging range of students our democracy’s public schools must accept.
Ask the nattering howling critics, who happily spend whatever public expenditures are required to build missile systems designed to win any global competition, to spend whatever it takes to build a public school system that can produce academic winners in a global competition and what do the pikers say?
You’re just throwing money at the problem.
Well, I oppose throwing money at your vouchers. Do not expect me to foot the bill for your financial and civic abandonment of our democracy’s foundational melting pot, America’s cornerstone institution, our public education system.
Horne will trumpet his culture war bombast because it is a way for the right to avoid talking in any meaningful fashion about genuine public education reform, because reform has never been the goal. Their eyes have always been on the prize of privatization. Unchained capitalism and freedom from regulation has given us the finest health care system in all the world. And slavery was employment relocation. And wokeness is the enemy of nap time. And we should ostracize, humiliate and persecute Arizona’s tiny minority of transgender kids.
And with no evidence critical race theory is taught in any K-12 school in Arizona, Horne promises to ban critical race theory. This minor detail doesn’t matter to Horne, the cynical bully who led the ban against Mexican American Studies here in Tucson. His racist ban, born out of ignorance and racist paranoia, was ruled to be unconstitutional and, surprise, surprise, racist.
Didn’t matter. Perception won. Damage done. Base riled. Horne hopes to rile the base this November. The radical, howling, pro-Trump, pro-life, pro-guns-and-God-in-the-classroom base. The history-revising, book-banning base. The predator-witch-hunting-base. The howling anti-vaccine, anti-mask base. The organized Purple for Parents base backing this November’s crop of howling school board candidates, promoting unhinged paranoia, peddling anti-public education lunacy and promising to root out the sinister predators lurking behind every locker and lectern.
Horne’s running mate, his would-be governor, Kari Lake, Arizona’s Sarah Palin in Fox anchor pancake, wants a Trump-inspired patriotic program taught in our schools. Today’s lesson: The January 6th insurrectionists were patriots brought to you by the letter Q for Q-Anon. What are the odds Horne and Lake would revive Rep. Michelle Udall’s bill banning educators from teaching that lays “blame based on race, ethnicity or sex” in our state’s public schools?
According to an Arizona Mirror account, Udall suggested teaching the Buffalo grocery store shooting, where a white supremacist killed Black citizens, should be taught without “judgment on the basis of race.” What lunacy!
Ducey’s dimwits gave him his universal school voucher program and transgender-persecuting laws to sign. Imagine the public education wrecking balls they’d hand Horne and a Governor Lake?
Hoffman, a former speech pathologist said, “It can be disheartening for me to see the divisive language that really puts a wedge between our schools and families, They want to be leading our school system. Yet they’re attacking it, and have this very negative rhetoric of distrust around our public schools in a time when our schools need our support more than ever.”
More than ever. Amen, Superintendent Hoffman. Amen.
