On Tuesday, California voters did something they’ve never done before.
They picked two sitting school board presidents to face off for state superintendent of public instruction.
Sonja Shaw of Chino Valley Unified led the pack with over 1.16 million votes. Richard Barrera of San Diego Unified came in second with nearly 916,000. They’ll meet again in November for the general election.
It’s a political first. It’s also a governance red flag the size of the California Department of Education.
Here’s the question nobody in the coverage is asking: What in either candidate’s background prepares them to run a nearly $100 billion state agency?
The honest answer? Nothing. And that’s not a knock on either candidate personally. It’s a reflection of a broken pipeline between school board service and executive leadership — a gap we’ve built into the system and then pretend doesn’t exist.
The Board-to-Statehouse Pipeline Has No Training Wheels
Let me be clear about what a school board president actually does.
You preside over meetings. You set agendas with your superintendent. You vote on policies, budgets, and contracts. You represent your district at community events. Your staff? Typically a part-time executive assistant, if that. Your budget authority is shared among five or seven peers. Your decisions are collective, deliberative, and almost always mediated by a professional superintendent who runs the day-to-day operations.
Now look at what California’s superintendent of public instruction does.
You oversee the California Department of Education — roughly 3,000 employees. You manage a budget that exceeds the GDP of most countries. You administer a funding system that distributes money to nearly 6 million students across more than 1,000 school districts. You have executive authority. You hire and fire. You set regulatory priorities. You answer to the governor, the legislature, and the voters — but your operational decisions are yours alone.
That’s not a promotion from school board president. That’s a career change.
The skill set that makes someone effective in the boardroom — collaboration, consensus-building, policy deliberation — is the exact opposite of what makes someone effective in the executive suite. A board president learns to share power. A state superintendent needs to wield it.
We’ve spent decades training school board members to govern well on boards. We haven’t spent a single minute training them for what happens when they leave the boardroom and walk into the corner office.
Candidate A: The Culture Warrior
Sonja Shaw is a phenomenon the California political establishment never saw coming.
Three years ago, she was a stay-at-home mom who “didn’t even know what a school board was.” Today, she’s the top vote-getter in a statewide race. Her rise tracks a national wave of conservative mothers who entered school board politics during the pandemic, angry about COVID restrictions and transgender athlete policies.
She’s authentic, passionate, and unpolished — and that’s exactly her appeal.
“She has fire in her belly,” one supporter told EdSource. That’s true. The question is whether fire in the belly is sufficient preparation to run an agency of 3,000 people.
Shaw has no college degree. She has no experience in education administration. Her professional background is personal training. Her policy vision is defined almost entirely by what she opposes — and she’s made opposition her brand. She accused the current superintendent of “perverting children” at a school board meeting. She’s positioned herself as someone who will “get in there and fight.”
Fight what? She’s not running for a seat on a debate panel. She’s running for an executive position that requires coalition-building with a legislature controlled by the opposite party, a governor with his own education agenda, and a workforce that’s overwhelmingly unionized.
The insurgent energy that got her this far is a political asset. It is not an executive competency.
Candidate B: The Insider
Richard Barrera is the establishment answer to Shaw. He’s been on the San Diego Unified board for years, currently serving as board president. He’s a senior policy adviser at the California Department of Education itself. The California Teachers Association poured $5 million into his campaign. Anthony Rendon, the former Assembly Speaker who finished fifth in the primary, endorsed him as the candidate who will “stand up to and defeat the dangerous extremist ideology of Sonja Shaw.”
Barrera has more proximity to the job than Shaw. He works inside CDE. He understands the policy machinery. He knows the players.
But proximity is not preparation.
Barrera’s professional identity is still that of a board member and policy adviser — not an executive. He’s never run an organization of CDE’s scale. He’s never managed a workforce of thousands. He’s never been the person whose name goes on the decision, not one of seven votes on a resolution.
And here’s the awkward truth nobody in the endorsement press releases wants to say: Barrera’s campaign is being framed almost entirely in opposition to Shaw. “Stop Shaw” is not a governance platform. It’s a political strategy.
The California Department of Education doesn’t need someone whose primary qualification is “the other candidate is worse.” It needs someone who has demonstrated the ability to lead a complex organization toward measurable student outcomes.
By that standard, the résumé gap is wide open.
The Real Problem Isn’t These Two Candidates
I want to be very careful here. I’m not saying Shaw and Barrera are bad people, or that neither could grow into the job. People surprise you. Some of the best superintendents I’ve worked with came from unconventional backgrounds.
But the fact that both of them made it to a statewide runoff without either having formal executive governance training tells you something about the system, not about them.
We have built a career ladder in education where board service is treated as a stepping stone to higher office — but we’ve built no on-ramp for developing the governance and executive skills that higher office requires.
School board members are expected to learn on the job. That’s fine for a volunteer role that meets twice a month. It’s not fine for the person who will oversee the education of 6 million children.
What would executive governance training look like for a candidate preparing to make this leap?
It would look like a framework for goal clarity — being able to name specific, measurable student outcome goals and build an organization around achieving them. It would look like progress monitoring systems — not just knowing that data matters, but knowing how to build the feedback loops that let you course-correct mid-year. It would look like understanding the difference between deliberative governance (what boards do) and executive management (what CEOs do) — and knowing when to switch modes.
Neither Shaw nor Barrera has been through anything like that. Neither has had to.
That’s not their failure. It’s ours.
What This Means for November
Between now and the general election, the coverage will focus on what you’d expect: culture war flashpoints, union endorsements, fundraising totals, attack ads. The usual theater.
What the coverage won’t focus on is the question that actually matters for California’s 6 million students:
Does either candidate have the governance training to lead one of the largest state education departments in the United States?
The answer right now is no. And the tragedy is that nobody’s asking — because we’ve normalized the idea that winning an election is the same thing as being qualified to govern.
It’s not. And California’s students deserve better than an election that treats the most important education leadership job in the country like a prize for whichever side yells louder.
AJ Crabill is the author of “The Effective School Board Member” and a governance coach who has worked with over 100 school boards across the United States. He does not endorse candidates for political office and has not contributed to any campaign in this race. His focus is on the governance readiness gap — and what to do about it.