Four years ago Arizona did not dodge a bullet when voters elected Diane Douglas to be Superintendent of Public Instruction—our public education chief. That year nearly every former superintendent, Republican and Democrat, endorsed David Garcia, a proven education leader. Even the conservative Arizona Republic backed Garcia, calling him a “champion for education,” whereas Douglas was never a teacher or school administrator, but merely a fundamentalist kook with crazy education ideas. Still, Douglas had an R after her name, and she astounded anyone who was paying attention by winning the race.
That was 2014. In the past four years Diane Douglas has performed about as well as her critics imagined she would—putting charters before public schools, trying to introduce Christian doctrine in classroom, cutting funding and increasing class sizes, and erasing sound science from the curriculum. As a result, Arizona places at or near the bottom in nearly every education measurement. In 2018, Diane Douglas did not even win the Republican primary for her job.
Instead, perennial candidate Frank Riggs won the GOP contest. I say “perennial” because Riggs was a three-term Congressman from California in the ‘90s who later ran for a California US Senate seat and then the Arizona governorship. He faired poorly both times. Perhaps, though, he probably thought, voters wouldn’t really pay that much attention to Arizona’s education race (as in 2014), and he could use his millions of dollars to buy legitimacy—and votes.
However, many people clearly were paying attention to education in Arizona, which we saw by the voters’ overwhelming rejection of Prop. 305—a measure that would have allowed charter schools to suck up even more public funding. (After voters rejected 305, charter school advocates turned immediately to the compliant legislature to fix things for them.)
In the superintendent’s race itself Riggs faced a first-time candidate—Kathy Hoffman, a speech pathologist for the Peoria School District. The young educator had little money and no political machine, but Hoffman’s passion and commitment to public schools clearly showed through in her ads and public appearances. Like the Sinema-McSally Senate race in Arizona, Hoffman was losing on election night, but the mail-in ballots put her over the top and she declared victory earlier this week.
In 2018, then, Arizona voters did dodge a bullet by not electing Frank Riggs, who, after leaving Congress, worked in charter school development, and would’ve continued Douglas’s efforts to dismantle public education and turn it over to the private sector. Beyond his policies, though, one has to question Riggs’s temperament, which was on full Twitter display this week (although subsequently deleted).
After local reporter Dave Leibowitz took a jab at Riggs ...
"Thanks for the tweet on #VeteransDay, you gutless punk," Riggs replied on Sunday. "Let me know if you ever wear the uniform, run for office, or serve in any capacity. All I did was protect the likes of you.
#Coward #SoMuchBetterOnline."
After Leibowitz jokingly Tweeted that they could settle their differences in a wrestling cage …
Riggs replied, “Anytime. Punk. You will be embarrassed, big time. Just message me. You & your pasty ilk are welcome to join me @ 5 am for one of my daily workouts. Can you do a pull-up yet?”
There were more schoolyard challenges to other reporters and lawyers in what turned out to be a 15-Tweet outburst. That’s what we want in our education chief—a bully and sore loser who takes to Twitter. One in the White House is enough.