A long-time San Diego schools leader has ed the already crowded race for California’s top education job — one that stands to shape how students learn, how schools serve their local communities and how California responds to challenges from the Trump istration.
Richard Barrera, a member of the San Diego Unified board since 2008, is so far the only local candidate to succeed state Superintendent Tony Thurmond, who faces term limits and is running for governor.
California’s elected schools superintendent, officially known as the superintendent of public instruction, runs the Department of Education and oversees public K-12 education statewide.
Barrera doesn’t have a background working in schools. However, in his 17th year on the San Diego Unified board, he feels the district — now almost a year out from a sexual-harassment scandal that ousted its previous leader — is in a good place, one healthy enough for him to move on.
Many past state superintendents, he notes, have come from the Legislature. Thurmond is a former Assembly member, and five of the 13 current candidates have been state lawmakers.
Barrera says he would bring a different perspective. He understands local school boards’ issues, he said, and can them effectively. He wouldn’t spend much time in Sacramento.
“I think the key decisions that are made — that really affect public schools in California — are made at the local level,” he said.
In a lengthy recent interview with The San Diego Union-Tribune, Barrera outlined his vision of the job.
He expressed his preference for local control of school districts, his feelings about Proposition 13, his view of the state superintendent job as that of an organizer and the lessons learned from his own district’s overhaul of its Title IX office following a damning federal investigation.
Barrera has never taught in a classroom, and he doesn’t see the job of state superintendent as one that ought to weigh in on curriculum issues. But with his reputation for close ties to labor, he stresses his of teachers.
“I want to hear from classroom teachers — especially from classroom teachers who have had success moving reading outcomes for kids that come at it with disadvantages,” he said.
He encourages school districts to prioritize educators’ needs, saying their schools will benefit from the growth and experience that comes from teacher retention.
“Do as much as possible to implement the solutions that your educators are calling for,” he said. “Your district is going to be better off, and your kids are going to thrive.”
On Title IX, and district lessons learned:
Last summer, San Diego Unified was struggling with two sexual harassment-related problems:
A federal investigation found the district had systematically failed to protect its students from sexual misconduct. Separately, weeks later, its superintendent was fired after he was found to have committed misconduct against two former employees. As the Union-Tribune reported, he had been the subject of prior complaints that were never shared with trustees.
Meanwhile, to comply with federal law on how it investigates sexual misconduct accusations by students, the district has undergone a large-scale reorganization — not just of its Title IX responses but of how it handles any complaints alleging violations of state or federal laws.
Now, Barrera is concerned about the Trump istration’s dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, the agency that investigated the district.
Last year’s report by that office was key to strengthening San Diego Unified’s Title IX protections, which could now serve as a model for other districts, Barrera said. The office’s current gutting makes the lessons already learned all the more important, he added.
In the future, Barrera said, districts may not be able to rely on an Office of Civil Rights probe, and they’ll need to step up and find gaps in their policies and practices themselves.
On literacy and the science of reading:
Barrera doesn’t state legislation that dictates the instruction of the science of reading. Instead, he wants resource or literacy teachers to work through strategies tailored to the needs of individual students.
“If we are going to improve reading outcomes for students in California, it’s not going to be done through bills in the Legislature,” he said. “It’s going to be done through the kind of that classroom teachers need directly, and that’s very much about school board superintendents.”
He’s doubtful that science-of-reading laws are responsible for improved outcomes in places like Mississippi, which ranked ninth among all states in fourth-grade reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress last year, up from 49th in 2013. “I have yet to see any research that says a change to curriculum is the one strategy that moves reading instruction,” he said.
On evaluating student progress:
But he says the NAEP, known as the “nation’s report card,” was never intended for ability, and argues California’s own dashboard to track progress is more important because once-a-year testing doesn’t track individual students’ progress.
To Barrera, it’s more important to conduct formative assessments throughout the school year.
“We’ve never evaluated how we’re doing based on the growth we’re seeing in students over the course of the school year,” he said. “Instead, we look at this kind of postmortem.”
At San Diego Unified, student wellness is one of the main goals — and there currently aren’t good metrics to measure it, he says. But he believes the district has done well at improving its college and career readiness metric.
On ethnic studies:
Under a 2021 state law, all school districts are supposed to offer an ethnic studies course starting this coming school year, using a state framework that teaches students about the histories, cultures, struggles and contributions of historically marginalized groups in America. All students starting high school will have to take such a course at some point to graduate.
But now, months before the requirement is supposed to take effect, Gov. Gavin Newsom is withholding state funding for ethnic studies, delaying the mandate and leaving school districts hanging.
Calling himself a strong believer in California’s ethnic studies requirement, Barrera strongly disagrees with Newsom’s failure to fund it in his proposed budget. Barrera acknowledged that it will take time for school districts to develop courses that meet the state’s requirements — but he said San Diego Unified will keep funding it, whatever happens in the state budget.
The ethnic studies requirement is not about how you teach students, he said, but about helping them see their communities as a source of pride and strength.
On helping to ease the affordable housing shortage:
At San Diego Unified, Barrera has been a er of the district’s ongoing creation of an ambitious housing plan, an effort he says aims to address two key issues for school districts — employee recruitment and retention, and declining enrollment.
In March, the board ed a sweeping plan to develop affordable homes in an attempt to ease a regionwide housing crisis — part of its ongoing effort to provide relief to its workforce, shore up enrollment and its operations with revenue from its vast real estate portfolio.
Even at the state level, Barrera said in the recent interview, decisions have to be made district by district.
He’s proposed creating a statewide pool that would let districts access upfront funding to help them negotiate with developers. And he says that as superintendent, he would work with entities like the California School Boards Association to help school boards learn more about what they can do on housing.
On charter schools:
Barrera s charter schools, and cautions that charter schools aren’t as “monolithic” as some might think. He himself used to serve on the board of San Diego Cooperative Charter School, which his children attended and which he said was created in an effort to develop a broader curriculum that emphasized student growth.
“A well-functioning charter school should be part of the public school ecosystem — I’ve always believed in that,” Barrera said. To him, that means bond measures should charters and district schools alike, and charters should be held to the same standards.
But he cautioned, too, that unfettered growth could be destabilizing, and that districts’ school boards need to ask whether a new charter school is really necessary for a community. In the past, he said, the San Diego Unified board was unable to deny new charters if they met all of the requirements — something he said led to a “Wild West” of charters.
On serving rural districts:
Although a veteran of a large, urban district, Barrera understands that small, rural districts — like many in Imperial County and the San Diego County backcountry — face unique challenges, not least the trouble raising the money they need to build and update their schools.
The state offers facilities funding to school districts, but it requires that districts raise their own matching funds via local bond measures first. That’s a problem for smaller rural districts.
The rules for matching funds are skewed against districts with low property-tax bases, Barrera pointed out — and those tend to be smaller and more rural, without the concentrations of high-value properties that can help raise hundreds of millions in districts like San Diego Unified.
Since those districts don’t have as much funding of their own, Barrera said state resources must be distributed equitably, and prioritize areas that can’t meet facilities needs on their own.
On Proposition 13 and taxes:
For decades, Proposition 13 — the landmark ballot measure that has capped property taxes since 1978 — has limited how much revenue schools can get from local property taxes.
Barrera says that he opposes loosening Proposition 13’s protections for homeowners, but he s repealing it for many non-residential properties.
Such a change was attempted in 2020 with Proposition 15, which would have changed tax assessments and raised taxes on commercial properties worth more than $3 million. Voters rejected the measure.
Barrera also s raising taxes on California’s highest earners, those who make more than $1 million per year, in order to invest the revenue in K-12 schools, expanded early childhood education and affordable and accessible higher education.
