Huppenthal, John

During Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal’s 26 years in public service, he has established himself as one of Arizona’s leading education reformers. As a state legislator, he successfully authored and passed over 200 bills, more bills than any other legislator in state history. A substantial number of those bills focused on improving education. For each of his 18 years in the state legislature, Huppenthal either served on or chaired education committees, ushering in an era of important education reforms, including:

1. Reforming Arizona’s Career Ladder Program for public school teachers. It is now recognized as the only Career Ladder Program in the country tied to verifiable academic gains.

2. Spreading teacher performance pay programs across Arizona, ensuring good teachers are rewarded for increasing student achievement.

3. Revamping measures of academic progress and graduation standards.

4. Providing critical resources to special needs children, including children with autism and blind and deaf students.

5. Expanding Arizona’s charter school system and Teach for America program.

6. Improving vocational education opportunities for children.

Recently, in 2010, Huppenthal championed common course numbering legislation for Arizona’s universities and colleges. He also passed an important school district accountability bill which will hold school district’s performance more accountable with fair, easy-to-understand letter grades.

Since the mid-1990’s Huppenthal has spent thousands of hours in schools observing best practices and personally implementing important education reforms and programs. His innovative accountability system which ties academic improvement and qualitative measures of excellence with performance pay has shown remarkable success in school districts that have adopted it.

An Arizona resident for over 55 years, Superintendent of Public Instruction Huppenthal was educated throughout Arizona’s expansive school system: attending elementary and secondary school in Tucson, earning an engineering degree from NAU in Flagstaff and receiving his MBA from ASU in Tempe.