Why San Diego Unified Trustee Richard Barrera Wants To Be State Supe

By Jakob McWhinney, the Voice of San Diego

May 19, 2025

Richard Barrera has an almost mythic status in San Diego County. He’s San Diego Unified’s longest-serving board member and has been at the center of many of the biggest changes at the district – from its labor-friendly shift to the hiring of Superintendent Cindy Marten, who President Joe Biden later made deputy superintendent of the U.S. Department of Education.

In his nearly 20 years as a trustee, Barrera’s progressive views have come to dominate the board, while his deep ties to unions have on more than one occasion led to cries of conflict of interest for the former Labor Council leader. The district has also steadily risen to become one of the top performing large urban districts in the country, according to metrics like nationwide test scores.

But earlier this month, Barrera announced he was setting his sights higher. He declared he was running to be California’s superintendent of public education.

The position is a strange one. While the state supe runs the California Department of Education, many decisions are the dominion of the California legislature and the governor. One of the position’s greatest powers isn’t listed in its job responsibilities: the ability to steer the conversation around public education in the Golden State.

This may be there where Barrera, an experienced organizer, could get the most done.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Give me just a quick elevator pitch, Richard. Why are you running to be the next superintendent of public instruction?

I’m in my 17th year on the San Diego Unified School Board. We’re the second biggest district in the state, and I think we’ve done a lot of really transformative work.

When I started, we were a district that was just not functioning well. There was a lot of division in the community and between district leadership and educators and parents, and it was difficult to make progress. The district had gone through a series of superintendents over a short period of time, had stagnated in terms of student outcomes, and was facing what I think could accurately be described as a $7 billion infrastructure deficit in terms of the need for renovation of facilities.

We’ve got a long way to go, but I think what we’ve built has been a model of a district that listens to the people who are closest to our kids, and that’s our educators, that’s our parents, that’s actually our students, and we have made significant progress on issues that that school districts should be working on.

In terms of student outcomes, the percentage of our students graduating having passed all the A to G courses (the suite of courses required for acceptance to California State University and University of California colleges), was at about 45 percent when I started on the board, and it’s now in the high 60s. And I think, most importantly, that number among Black and Latino students when I started was in the mid-20s, and now is at about district average.

Our college and career readiness rate on the state dashboard is 62 percent where the state average is 45 percent. The most recent (Nation’s Report Card test) scores show that we’re No. 1 among all large urban districts in the country in literacy. We’re No. 2 in math.

We’ve passed four bond measures, an $11.5 billion program that is larger than the entire state’s bond program and that’s led to an absolute transformation of our school facilities all over the district.

I also believe that the key decisions in education in California are made at the local level. And you know, so it’s school boards, it’s superintendents up and down the state, that are making the key decisions that have the biggest impact on students.

The way that I would perform the role as state superintendent is to not be spending a lot of time in Sacramento. It’s to be out, building relationships with local communities, helping them imagine what’s possible and bringing together coalitions that can actually move things and make real progress.

Q: California, like many states, has seen a stagnation, if not a decline, of students meeting standards on tests. How would you approach trying to get students back on track and learning?

If you take kind of the four big goals that we set as the San Diego Unified board – wellness, literacy, math and college and career readiness – on each of those, major goals there are strategies that we know are effective. When we talk about literacy and math, we know how important it is to have literacy coaches, math coaches, working in a classroom side by side with teachers and helping those teachers focus on the kids who need the most support.

I think bringing awareness of strategies and success stories that we’ve seen in different districts is the is the best way to actually move student achievement.

What I don’t think will move literacy and math achievement is endless debates in the legislature about curriculum. With literacy, this whole debate about science of reading, with math, students being in advanced math – those kinds of philosophical debates that occupy so much time in the legislature, and so much time that goes into trying to craft legislation that ultimately is going to be some watered-down version of what people think are the magic-bullet answers. I don’t think that’s going to move outcomes for kids. What moves outcomes for kids is successfully implementing at the district level strategies that we know work.

Q: As you referenced there, for years now, California legislators have tried to pass bills mandating science-backed methods to reading instruction be taught in California schools, but the bills have been repeatedly spiked, largely because of opposition from the state’s largest teachers union. From what you said there, it sounds like you don’t necessarily support embracing a more uniform reading curriculum.

I think evidence-based curriculum is always important. You don’t want classroom teachers wasting time with curriculum and techniques that are not going to improve students’ reading and math.

But any classroom teacher will tell any of us that, if they have 25 kids in their classroom, those kids’ learning styles are unique. When we’re talking about literacy, with some kids there’s a need to emphasize phonics. There’s a need to emphasize comprehension with all kids. There’s always a need to make reading engaging and enjoyable. So, on that day, in that classroom with that student, what’s the strategy that’s going to be most effective?

That’s a lot more about the skill of a teacher than it is about any curricular solution. If we’re talking about really supporting teachers getting better, having an experienced resource teacher that’s there at the school working with them in the classroom … and pulling teachers together and in learning communities – that’s what you know actually improves outcomes.

Q: We have seen state legislation lead to big impacts. You can look at states like Mississippi that have passed laws that that have mandated the teaching science of reading-backed curriculum, Mississippi’s reading scores have significantly increased since then.

If we’re going to do this sort of use Mississippi as an example and compare it to California, then we owe it to everybody, especially our classroom educators, to really dig deep into, into what has happened in Mississippi, and how it relates to California.

So, has the passing of legislation around curriculum led to big gains? What’s been the implementation around that curriculum? What’s been the strategy for professional development? What has actually changed? Where did Mississippi begin compared to California? Where is it now? My understanding of Mississippi is it kind of plateaued a few years ago and now has dropped back a little bit.

It’s important to understand success stories … but I think it’s always important that when we say, ‘Hey, this is something worth paying attention to,’ in this case, in Mississippi, that we dig in and we understand what’s happened.

If the answer is the state passed legislation that changed the curriculum and that led to miraculous improvements in reading, I think that’s probably a pretty surface level understanding of what’s actually happened, and that kind of thing can lead to big mistakes.

Q: Education is at a pivot point right now. Flashy tech companies are flooding the zone with AI powered products they claim will just revolutionize the field of education. But AI presents big risks and big question marks. How would you approach AI in educational settings?

I think we have to approach this really carefully. I think we need to understand from classroom teachers especially, and from students where allowing the use of AI could be helpful and where the real risks are.

We need to be careful of magic-bullet solutions. The tendency of private industry is to offer up solutions they claims will dramatically improve student outcomes and private industry’s motivation is to make profit, not to improve outcomes for students, and certainly not to help achieve equitable outcomes in public education.

It’s not that there aren’t tools that can be useful.

But we need to approach it first with an understanding about how improvement happens. It never is that one tool comes to dramatically change everything for the better. The way improvement happens over time is people, and primarily educators, coming together, trying things out, learning.

Frankly, part of the pitch from technology … especially in tough budget circumstances is, “We can just replace human beings, professional educators, with technology and that’s going to be cheaper and somehow that’s going to produce best better results.”

If a teacher is going to get good use out of tools like AI, it’s going to be based on that teacher’s relationship with individual students, that teacher’s understanding of what individual students need. But I think there are risks of AI, frankly, exacerbating inequity.

One of the things that we know about the algorithms that drive these tools, is if inequity exists, those tools are going to amplify that inequity if there are no guardrails.

Q: On that inequity note public education has long been plagued by inequities and inequalities. It’s a truism that wealthier students perform better than poor students, and that’s played out at San Diego Unified. At some schools in poorer areas like Logan Memorial, in your sub district, only 19 percent of students meet state English standards and only 10 percent meet state math standards. But in wealthier areas like Scripps Ranch, 87 percent of students meet state standards on English and math. How would you advocate for beginning to close this gap and move toward more equal outcomes for kids of all backgrounds?

It’s critical that we as a society understand the challenges that our kids face when they come into the school system. Those challenges include poverty, income inequality, racism and all of those issues impacting students’ physical health, mental health.

The public school system is the No. 1 vehicle that we’ve always had in our society to push back against those challenges. It is the institution in our society that makes it possible to challenge inequity.

But in order for public schools to make good on their promise, they need to have the resources that our educators need, that our students need.

If our students had access to lower class sizes so they had an ability to have a stronger relationship with their teachers, if our students had more access to mental health professionals, including counselors and therapists, if our students had more access to what you just wrote about, middle-school sports and arts and music and ethnic studies and all of the, you know, things that we know actually engage students and make them feel good about themselves and make them want to be motivated to learn more. You know, if they had access to everything that we know works, then what would their numbers start to look like?

When we think about California, the fourth wealthiest economy in the world, and then we look at… comparisons in funding between states. … for the percentage of the state wealth that’s invested back into the public education system, California always ranks at or near rock bottom. We have the resources in this state to provide every student what they need and that is part of what I want to help lead.

The wealthiest people in our state are about to get a huge tax cut from the Trump administration at the federal level, and so we’re going to see even more of a windfall go to people at the very top. And I think we should be looking at a tax on the wealthiest Californians… and putting that money back into our public schools.

The great frustration I’ve had for 17 years has been looking at what’s possible.

We have the ability to expand high-quality, free, accessible early-childhood education. We also have the ability to expand high quality, accessible, affordable higher education.

We’ve got the wealth in the state to make sure that our class sizes are low enough, that we have mental health professionals, extracurriculars, and everything that we know, you know, makes school worth going to for students.

Q: You’ve talked a lot over the years about wanting to rethink the basic footprint of public education, and you’ve advocated for creating more programs like Logan Memorial that expand public school all the way to preschool, potentially supplanting some of the kind of pricey private childcare system that exists now. Is this something you would pursue as superintendent? And if so, how would you advocate that that the state approach stuff like this?

What (universal transitional kindergarten) did is it created a new grade through the public schools. And I think that’s an efficient way of doing it, but that doesn’t have to be the only way of doing it.

The first step is to just identify that the goal is high-quality, accessible, free, early childhood care provided by educators who can support their own families. And if that’s the goal, then the delivery system is something that I would very much want to work with people on together.

I would foresee that delivery system would be a mix of public schools and community-based providers, but what we have now is such a far cry from that, you know, from that. Aside from UTK and state preschool, finding high quality, accessible, affordable, much less free early childhood is very, very difficult for families, and the educators are paid poverty wages.

What we have now is not adequate. We need to get the investment into that system. And I would want to help lead that conversation.

Q: Your campaign is based on the track record of San Diego Unified and there have been advances during your time on the board. But San Diego Unified has also faced a series of crises as well. Just last year there was the Department of Education investigation into misconduct, then the settlement. There was the investigation and firing of Superintendent Lamont Jackson. What do you think those crises say about your time on the board, and what do you think they say about whether voters should trust you to lead California’s schools?

What voters can trust is that when issues come up, I will deal with them. I’m going to be transparent about them, and I’m going to face them head on, even when they’re when they’re hard to hard to deal with.

The Lamont (Jackson) situation was a difficult situation to deal with, but the reason that you know the person who made the first allegations came to me was because she trusted me, and I followed up. We were clear in the resolution that there’s no place in our district for harassment.

In terms of the response to the (Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights) investigation, prior to the findings from the investigation we had already created our expanded IX office and hired experienced investigators. So, when we became aware of the issue, we addressed it.

I also think that there are many, many districts, up and down our state … where students and staff are vulnerable to being mistreated, harassed, abused, because there are not the proper protections in place.

My work with school board members up to down the state will certainly include, “Hey, look, here’s our experience in San Diego Unified. There are a lot of great things and some very difficult things and we had to learn those things in a difficult way and my advice is, get out in front and do your own analysis, do your own internal audits, make sure that you’re putting structures in place that protect your students and your staff.”

Q: One of the things Voice reporters have long covered is educator misconduct. And one of the things that we’ve uncovered in our investigations is that too often systems allow educators that have engaged in misconduct to move from one district to the next without being held fully accountable for their actions. Do you think that there need to be additional barriers put in place to prevent things like the “pass the trash” strategy?

Yes.

It really shouldn’t be an option that school districts can negotiate settlements where people are likely to go someplace else and reoffend. So, I would certainly support pulling together a policy discussion that’s thoughtful, but that protects against the understandable tendency for school districts to push their problems onto another district.

Q: This is a very tumultuous time for educators, tumultuous time for districts, particularly in Democratic-leaning States. President Donald Trump has pledged to withhold federal funding from districts that refuse to go along with everything from banning of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, to districts that are inclusive of trans students. How would you approach interacting with Trump?

My track record at San Diego Unified, going back to the first Trump administration has been to help lead the way to protect all of our students, whether that’s our immigrant students or LGBTQ students. We’ve put policies in place, strategies in place and connected families to community-based resources to push back at that.

The president of the United States is choosing to act in an unlawful way and in a way that picks on certain groups of people, to advance his own political agenda, and there’s no room for putting our head down and hoping, “Well, if we just go along with a little bit of it, maybe we won’t be targets.” There’s just no room for that. You’ve got to stand up. We’ve got to fight back in every way possible, including in court.

The fact that Trump is using federal education resources as leverage to try to get both the state and local school districts to capitulate to his agenda is all the more reason for us to go and raise that revenue ourselves. The people in this state who are going to benefit from his tax cuts have a responsibility also to make sure that we’ve got the resources we need so that we’re not vulnerable to his threats. We should make sure that we’ve got, you know, the resources ourselves so that we can’t be held hostage.

But we should go further and say, and by the way, the federal government should be doing a lot more than it ever has. The federal government has always under invested in education. Special education is the perfect example. The kind of investment we saw during COVID, that was the investment we always needed for schools.

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