Tom Horne

Thomas Charles Horne (born March 28, 1945) is an American politician, attorney, businessman, and activist who has served as the Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction since 2023 and previously from 2003 to 2011.

He was raised in New York, and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1954.

He graduated from Mamaroneck High School in the early 1960s.

He was a Democrat before becoming a Republican.

Horne was the president of T.C. Horne & Co., an investment firm he founded in the late 1960s, while he was a student at Harvard Law School.

He attended the March on Washington in 1963.

Horne graduated from Harvard College in 1967 and Harvard Law School in 1970.

Soon after graduating from law school, he moved to Arizona.

Horne was a trial lawyer.

Horne served as a teacher of Legal Writing at Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law and wrote a text on construction law published by the State Bar of Arizona.

The firm went bankrupt in 1970, and in 1973, the Securities and Exchange Commission banned Horne from the securities industry for life.

The 1973 SEC report said that that as president of T.C. Horne & Co, Horne "among other things, violated the record-keeping, anti-fraud, and broker-dealer net capital provisions of the federal securities laws and filed false financial reports with the commission. Horne stipulated (i.e., chose not to dispute) an SEC finding that he and his firm "willfully aided and abetted" in violations of securities law; he neither admitted nor denied guilt. From 1997 to 2002, Horne failed to disclose the bankruptcy in corporate filings to the Arizona Corporation Commission on at least four occasions. When asked in 2010 about the omissions, he said he had forgotten about the bankruptcy. Asked about the 1973 SEC ban in 2010, Horne blamed errors by a company that he had contracted to do accounting, and on his attempt to use "early-on computerization" while working and being a law student.

Horne was first elected to public office in 1979, when he was elected to the Paradise Valley Unified School District board.

He served on the board for the next 24 years, and was board chair for ten of those years.

Horne was elected to the Arizona House of Representatives in 1996, and served from 1997 to 2001.

In 2000, Horne ran for the Arizona Senate for District 24, but lost the Republican primary to Dean Martin.

In 2003, Horne was elected Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction; he served two terms, ending in 2011.

Horne oversaw the adoption to new Arizona's social studies standards, implemented beginning in the 2007-08 school year, under which all students "learn lessons in five areas including American history, world history, geography, civics and government, and economics" in each year from kindergarten through high school.

Horne was an advocate for full-day kindergarten, citing research that showed that such programs reduce the achievement gap between students from poor households and those from more affluent homes.

He also pushed for nutritional standards that removed junk food vending machines from elementary schools and created incentives for secondary schools to do so on a voluntary basis.

Horne, a classically trained pianist and founder of the Phoenix Baroque Ensemble, advocated for increasing arts education in schools.

Horne also continued to implement the Arizona Instrument to Measure Success standardized test; performance on the AIMS test (either alone or in combination with Advanced Placement examss and International Baccalaureate exams) determines graduating high school students' qualification for a "high honors" diploma, which guarantees free tuition at Arizona's three public universities.

Horne implemented policies that discouraged bilingual education and sought to shut down the Tucson Unified School District's controversial Mexican American Studies Department Programs.

He argued that the Tucson ethnic studies programs "separated students by race, taught them that they are oppressed, and was influenced by Marxist and communist philosophies."

He drafted a 2010 state law (which was adopted and went into effect in 2011, as HB 2281.) that effectively banned ethnic studies, and led to the Tucson Unified School District board closing its program in January 2012.

A group of students and parents sued over the state law, leading to seven years of legal proceedings.

On November 2, 2010, Horne defeated Felecia Rotellini in the race for Arizona Attorney General in the 2010 elections.

Within a few weeks of becoming A.G., his office had filed an appearance in Arizona v. United States, defending the governor and the state against the Obama administration's federal court challenge to S.B. 1070.

The previous A.G., Terry Goddard, had withdrawn from the case, acceding to the demands of Governor Jan Brewer.

Shortly after winning the 2010 election, Horne announced an intent to pursuing violations of the Arizona Consumer Fraud Act and other consumer protections violation.

This led to a string of sting operations against auto repair businesses in the Valley.

Along with state attorney generals in many other states, Horne's office represented Arizona in multi-state settlements with the nation's five largest mortgage servicers (Arizona's share was $1.6 billion of a $25 billion nationwide deal involving 49 AGs); with Sirius XM (Arizona's share was $230,000 of the $3.8 million settlement), and with Pfizer Inc. (over allegations of unlawful promotion of Rapamune; Arizona's share was $721,169 out of the nationwide $35 million settlement).

A member of the Republican Party, he was Attorney General of Arizona from 2011 to 2015.

In a 2012 United States Supreme Court case, Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, Inc., Horne argued that Arizona's voter registration requirements were not preempted by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.

The Court ruled in favor of the Native American tribes, and against Horne and Arizona, by a 7–2 vote.

Horne ran for reelection as Attorney General but lost to Mark Brnovich in the 2014 Republican primary.

He returned to the office of Superintendent of Public Instruction in 2023, having been elected to that office in the 2022 election.

Horne was born in Quebec to Polish Jewish parents.

In July 2017, Horne testified in the litigation; in his testimony, he defended the law and asserted that the Tucson program was led by radical teachers.

The federal district court, later in 2017, ultimately issued a permanent injunction blocking Arizona from enforcing the law, determining that the decision to ban the Tucson program was "motivated by a desire to advance a political agenda by capitalizing on race-based fears" and was unconstitutional.