HUPPENTHAL DOES IT AGAIN—DOESN’T LET FACTS GET IN THE WAY

I wish School Superintendent John Huppenthal would take a good “reading comprehension” class because obviously, he has problems understanding what he reads. I’ve been catching him distorting the facts for years.
The latest example is how he misrepresented—to an absurd and embarrassing degree—a study he had ordered on Tucson’s ethnic studies program. While he claimed it supported his contention the class was in violation of a new anti-ethnic-studies state law, the report did exactly the opposite.
As the Republic noted in an editorial this morning, “Did he think people weren’t going to read the study?” The Republic found the report actually heaped PRAISE on the Tucson class and found NO violations of the law.
For me, this was deja vu all over again, because years ago, I caught John Huppenthal doing exactly the same thing when he fought all-day kindergarten.
Back in 2005, he was a State Senator representing Chandler, and I was writing columns for Phoenix magazine.
My March, 2005 column unmasked his ridiculous campaign against then-Gov. Janet Napolitano’s campaign to bring Arizona into the 21st Century on early childhood education—she was successful, but of course, under the right-of-Genghis-Khan state leadership we now have, it’s been gutted.
Huppenthal was the outspoken leader of the group trying to convince Arizona and lawmakers that “all-day kindergarten is not worth the investment” and is nothing but “all-day babysitting.”
In a column he wrote for the Republic in November of 2004, he said: “One of the best education studies ever done says that we will spend more than $200 million per year on all-day kindergarten and get less than nothing in return, even losing ground in other states.” He claimed that national study concluded “all-day kindergarten students suffer from lower academic motivation, lower teamwork skills and great anti-social behavior at the end of kindergarten. At the end of third grade, all-day kindergarten students achieve lower academic gains in reading and math.”
As I wrote in my 2005 column: “I remember reading those words and thinking, Huh????” I’ve been writing about education for 40 years and those words contradicted everything I knew about the subject. I wrote: “ As I’ve learned over all these years of sticking my nose in other people’s business, when something smells wrong, there’s usually a pile of crap somewhere.”
So I went looking—went on line and read the very study Huppenthal quoted and found myself puzzled, because it NEVER SAID ANY OF THOSE THINGS.
But I did find this: “Children gained an average of 81 points in reading and 63 points in mathematics from the beginning of kindergarten to the end of third grade,” and when I asked an expert what that meant, he said it meant “that’s a lot of learning.”
The way I read the report, Huppenthal was wrong about every single point.
But to be sure I wasn’t missing something, I tracked down the expert in Washington, D.C. who wrote the study. He told me he couldn’t figure out how Huppenthal came to those conclusions, either, since that’s not what his report said.
As the headline of my All-day Kindergarten column said: “Senator John Huppenthal is doing everything he can do to shut it down—he’s even distorting the facts.”
So here he is, all these years later, now heading our Education Department (OMG!!!) and he’s repeating his distortions all over again.
I have little hope that John Huppenthal will ever let the facts get in his ideological way—and I find his right-wing ideology a great danger to Arizona’s education system.
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