State schools chief Tom Horne faces a fierce fight for Arizona Attorney General.

In short, the gloves have come off.

But Horne’s entry into politics was not so bare-knuckled. In 1978, he won a seat on the Paradise Valley District governing board. He wanted to ensure academic rigor for his children, who attended Paradise Valley schools.

He was elected to the Arizona Legislature in 1996 after switching parties from Democratic to Republican, which held the majority in the district. As a lawmaker, he says he worked to restore education funding. As state schools chief, he fought to restore state funding for vocational education, but the ax fell elsewhere. Lawmakers cut 75 percent of the $215 million used for books, classroom supplies and computers, and about $218 million from all-day kindergarten, a program Horne supports.

“Studies show that a dollar spent on education when a child is young and the brain is being formed is the same as seven dollars spent in high school to get the same academic results,” he says.

All the same, John Wright, president of the Arizona Education Association – the state’s largest teachers union – says Horne could have been more outspoken.

“We would like to see our superintendent vocally and vigorously protect funding,” Wright says. “I think that was a missed opportunity for Mr. Horne. I think he was absent from the bully pulpit.”

In the Tucson Unified School District, Horne attacked what he saw as a program geared to inflame Hispanic resentment toward the United States and lobbied to ban ethnic studies, including the Latino-oriented class, La Raza. The Legislature agreed with the passage of House Bill 2281, titled – in part – “prohibited courses.”

“We teach all the students about the contributions of different groups,” he says. “To divide them up by race and teach them only about their own history is the opposite of what you should do. School is a place to broaden people’s horizons, not to narrow them.”

When it comes to ethnic persecution, however, Horne has his own story to tell. His family is Jewish. Before he was born, his father, mother and sister lived in Poland.

Horne’s father, who predicted Hitler would invade Poland, moved the family to Canada a year before the invasion. Horne was born in Montreal in 1945. His family later moved to New York, and Horne became a U.S. citizen at the age of 9 when his mother and father became naturalized citizens.

History is filled with the oppression of minorities, and HB 2281 recognizes that. It doesn’t prohibit teaching of the Holocaust, other acts of genocide and oppression of groups based on ethnicity, race or class. For Horne, these are valuable lessons to be learned so that history doesn’t repeat itself.

Still, the ban on ethnic studies has drawn fire from the Hispanic community, and Horne’s focus on La Raza also drew criticism from state Representative Rich Crandall of Mesa, a fellow Republican and chairman of the House Education Committee.

“Instead of focusing on academic achievement, he spent the last six months on, ‘How do I get rid of this program?’” says Crandall, who voted in favor of HB 2281. “This year he didn’t bring a single bill to the Legislature except La Raza.”

“We have eight years of flat achievement,” Crandall adds.

Horne says standardized test scores prove otherwise, but even those have come under fire. The biggest salvo was launched in 2007 by Matthew Ladner, vice president for education issues at the Goldwater Institute, a Phoenix-based conservative think tank.

Ladner questioned the reliability of scores on the TerraNova, a standardized test that showed Arizona students performing above the national average. A different test administered by the U.S. Department of Education showed Arizona students actually underperformed, Ladner says. Horne disputes Ladner’s findings.

But there is one area where the record on Horne is clear, says ASU education professor Michael Kelley: Horne’s dedication.

“I give him a great deal of credit for his commitment to public education,” Kelley says.

— Bill Coates can be reached at phxmag@citieswestpub.com.