Superintendent Tom Horne says he is working on some plans and will send them to the State Board of Education for consideration.
In the month he's been in office, Horne says he has been trying to improve low student test scores.
“It’s because they’ve had all these distractions,” Horne said in a one-on-one interview.
Horne believes those distractions include social-emotional learning, a method where teachers help students process feelings and work on their social and emotional skills.
“I'm getting complaints from teachers who say they want to teach academics. They want to teach chemistry, let’s say. They didn't sign up to be a psychologist and deal with feelings,” Horne said.
Arizona’s largest teacher’s union president, Marisol Garcia, says social-emotional learning, or SEL, has been around for a long time and that there’s now a name to it.
“With my students, if somebody came in and was having a bad day and he threw their backpack in the back of the classroom, maybe figure out like, ‘Hey, you need a few minutes, sit right there.’ That is social-emotional learning,” Garcia said.
Horne believes schools are focusing too much on it and that is time that could be used for academics.
He told ABC15 he does believe that if kids are having emotional problems, a social worker or counselor should be in schools to help students talk about it.
“What’s your definition of critical race theory?” ABC15 asked Horne.
“I define it as the opposite of my own values, which is we’re all individuals. We’re all brothers and sisters under the skin. What’s important about an individual is what you know, what can you do, what is your character, what is your ability to appreciate beauty, not what race you were born into, which I believe is completely irrelevant to anything,” Horne said. “Critical race theory is [the] opposite of that. They teach that race is primary, and they emphasize racial divisions.”
Critical Race Theory, or CRT, is the study looking at how race and racism shaped American law and society. CRT is typically taught in university-level courses.
When asked what Horne’s evidence is that it’s being taught in K-12 schools, Horne said he saw it in Tucson's curriculum. School districts in Tucson have denied teaching CRT, as other public schools and educators have.
“Critical race theory is not taught in K-12 schools. It never has been taught in K-12 schools and to be honest with you, most educators had never heard about it until about three years ago when it became a media story or something that parents were all of a sudden being told about,” Garcia said.
Horne also mentions a petition that more than 200 Arizona teachers signed saying they’d defy the laws and legislation if “states took action against CRT.”
The Zinn Education Project website says teachers pledge to “tell the truth” and not lie to students.
Horne says he believes there is a difference in teaching what happened in U.S. history compared to what he believes is critical race theory.
“I don’t know anybody who joins me in opposing critical race theory who thinks we should not teach about the horrors of slavery, of Jim Crow, what happened in Oklahoma and so forth,” he said.
The state superintendent says he plans on opening a hotline for parents to call in, with complaints that they can investigate.
Horne says he is also working on changing the formula for determining school letter grades, adding he wants to make sure schools are getting credit for improvements in scores and penalize schools for teaching CRT.
Horne says the plans on how to do that are still in the works.
