Shaw, Barrera Clash Over Parental Rights, Trump And SAT In California State Superintendent Debate

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California superintendent of public instruction candidates Sonja Shaw and Richard Barrera offered sharply different visions for the state’s top elected education post during a Wednesday evening debate hosted by EdSource, clashing over testing, parental rights, LGBTQ+ students and the role of politics in schools.   

Here are the top takeaways from the sole debate between the State Superintendent of Public Instruction candidates before the Nov. 3 election.

Shaw and Barrera show how they’d use their bully pulpit

If the elected position — which come January will no longer include oversight of the state Department of Education — will primarily serve as a bully pulpit, Shaw and Barrera showed they may be able to use it well, albeit from contrasting philosophical and policy positions.

Barrera, 59, the president of the San Diego Unified School District board and a senior policy adviser in the California Department of Education, said he sees the job as that of “an organizer.” He said he would build “coalitions around ideas to make our world a better place, and in this case, to make our public schools better.”

“We’ve got so many disparate entities in California that have some degree of responsibility for education, but what we don’t have is a clear set of goals and priorities for what we want our students to achieve,” Barrera said.

Shaw, 44, president of the board of the Chino Valley Unified School District, is a former personal trainer and mother of two daughters. She hammered on what she called failed policies resulting in low math and reading scores, rampant spending and her signature issues of parents’ rights and opposition to transgender girls competing on female athletic teams.

 “More than half of our kids cannot read and write and do math, that’s priority number one,” she said, adding she’d “focus on reading, writing and math and pathways to success after high school, taking politics out of the classroom, and making sure our parents have a seat at the table.”

Trump mentioned often

Barrera quickly evoked the president during the debate. “If you like the way Donald Trump runs this country (with) division, dishonesty, absurdity, then, yeah, put Sonja in charge of our public schools. If you actually want somebody who knows what he’s doing, vote for me.”

He said Shaw would “roll over when Trump cuts money from our schools because we’re not discriminating against immigrant students, LGBTQ students, students of color. It’s all about the culture wars. That’s not where our focus needs to be.”

“I’ve never even met with the dude,” Shaw quipped about Trump, suggesting Barrera suffers from what the president calls “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” and questioning whether Barrera needs “mental health treatment.”

Candidates weigh in on UC’s SAT exam issue

Noting that the winner would be a voting member on the UC Board of Regents, the candidates went hard at each other on whether the university system should return to using standardized testing in admissions. Professors have complained that some students cannot do middle school-level math, and have urged the public university system to reinstate high-stakes exams to assess students’ preparedness.

“We need to have something to measure, to make sure children are ready to go to our UCs,” Shaw said. “That is a mental health crisis, sending these young adults to a prestigious university (when) they don’t even understand what’s going on. Then you have professors signing letters saying, ‘California kids are not ready. They can’t do algebra.’”

The regents are expected to decide next year whether to return to standardized testing.

Barrera said, “The question, again, is how do we prepare young people so that when they get to college, they’re likely to succeed?

Noting that he attended UC San Diego, he said, “I’m seeing the same sink-or-swim attitude on the part of a lot of faculty that existed 30, 40 years ago. It’s the job of everybody to support our students, not to simply think we’re in an elite institution and, therefore, it’s not our job to teach.”

Shaw and Barrera on how they fared in debate

In a statement issued following the debate, Shaw said her opponent “invoked Donald Trump in every speaking window because he knows he cannot match me in issues and results.” 

Barrera, in a short post-debate interview, said Shaw “turns every question into a circus.”

He added that perhaps their only common ground is “we both see the importance” of understanding and supporting schools at the local level.”