Richard Barrera will be the next state superintendent of public instruction, with opponent Sonja Shaw conceding the race on Wednesday.
Barrera, the school board president of San Diego Unified, was ahead by double digits in ongoing tallies and already had declared victory. He was the heavy favorite as the Democrat in the race, even though the office is listed as nonpartisan.
Barrera, 59, described his campaign message as “a positive vision for our public schools. We’ve got so many examples of great work happening in our public schools that deserve to be elevated.”
He also campaigned on increasing school funding and “a message that our public schools need to be healthy, safe communities for all of our students. I think that was a clear contrast to a message that our public schools are failing.”
Barrera benefited from more than $9 million in independent campaign spending in support of his election by the California Teachers Assn., or CTA, which he said was instrumental in helping him get his message out.
In a social media post conceding the race Wednesday night, Shaw said she ran “because I believe California’s children deserve better.”
“The problem is that for decades, the same people have had their hands on our education system, while our children have continued to fall behind,” she said in the post. “I believed we had an opportunity to change that. I still believe in the movement we created. They want us to give up, we are not going to!”
The superintendent’s office has an uncertain future. In June, the Legislature signed off on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to reshape the position, transferring oversight of schools and management of the state Education Department to an appointee of the governor. By nearly all accounts, the state superintendent’s power has been dramatically reduced. Many of the new duties of the elected office have yet to be worked out.
Barrera hopes to move quickly as an education advocate, laying out specific budget proposals and policy priorities in setting an agenda for Gov.-elect Xavier Becerra to respond to.
Although Barrera prevailed by a comfortable margin, Shaw outperformed other statewide Republican candidates in Tuesday’s blue wave election for Democrats.
Overall, Barrera and Shaw fit squarely within their ideological camps.
A centerpiece of Shaw’s campaign was her opposition to allowing transgender athletes to compete in girls’ and women’s sports — a position that had strong support in recent polling.
Barrera supports California law on this matter, which allows transgender participation. He has noted that the number of transgender athletes is exceedingly small.
Shaw, 44, broadly characterized the public education system as failing because of liberal Democratic policies, although she praised the quality of the public schools where she lives, Chino, which is in San Bernardino County.
On the November ballot, Barrera supported tax measures that benefit education. He also has consistently opposed Trump administration policies. He has sought to offer support for families affected by immigration enforcement as a senior official in the state’s second-largest school system.
Shaw’s views correspond closely with those of the Trump administration’s Education Department, although during the campaign, she repeatedly separated her policy positions from those of Trump, asserting, for example, in a campaign forum, that she “never even met with the dude.”
As a school board president, Shaw led efforts to ban unsanctioned flags on campuses and in classrooms. Some conservative activists have promulgated such bans with the aim of targeting gay pride flags. Shaw’s board majority also approved mandatory parent notification of their child’s gender-identity expression at school and a policy that allowed parents to challenge school library books with content they deemed sexually explicit. The parent notification policy is tied up in litigation, and advocates have filed a challenge to the library book policy with the state Education Department.
CTA’s campaigning for Barrera was embedded in the union’s hard push for Proposition 3, an initiative that would establish as permanent the current higher tax rates on state residents with the highest taxable income — about the top 2%.
Shaw opposed Proposition 3, which was well ahead Thursday morning.
Leading up to this race, CTA had backed the last eight winners for the state schools office, going back 32 years.
With a crowded field of Democrats in the June primary, Shaw had an opening as a Republican and finished first with 22.6% of the vote, compared with Barrera’s 20.3%.
Analysts, however, expected Barrera to consolidate the votes of Democrats and predicted that the support of CTA, and other unions to a lesser extent, would make a difference for him.
Leaving the office is two-term incumbent Tony Thurmond, who was barred by term limits from serving again and ran unsuccessfully for governor.