This article first appeared in EdSource.
Please see EdSource’s story on Sonja Shaw, board president of the Chino Valley Unified School District, also a candidate for state Superintendent of Public Instruction.
In 2013, as the San Diego Unified School District school board prepared for another superintendent search, board member Richard Barrera threw out an unexpected name: Cindy Marten, an elementary school principal with no other administrative experience. Barrera had watched her create a thriving school community in an immigrant neighborhood and was impressed.
It was a very unorthodox choice, but Barrera persisted. Two board members interviewed her that night, and, by midnight in a closed meeting, he had the support of a majority of the five-member board. The public vote the next week was unanimous.
The appointment of Marten, who went on to serve as superintendent for eight years and then four years as U.S. deputy secretary of education, illustrates how Barrera, 59, has been the undisputed education leader for his 18 years on the board of the state’s second-largest district, according to former school board member John Lee Evans and other colleagues and observers.
His power in the 100,000-student district, they said, reflects a combination of diligence, persistence and quiet, behind-the-scenes persuasion — skills he would take to the position of state superintendent of public instruction, should he win the Nov. 3 election.
His opponent, Sonja Shaw, the president of Chino Valley Unified School District, is a contrast in leadership. If they were to dress in character for Halloween, Barrera would be Clark Kent to Shaw’s Wonder Woman.
“One of his strengths is really being able to talk to people from different points of view, whether it’s downtown business people or union leaders,” said Evans, a psychologist who was elected with Barrera in 2008 and was an ally for the next 12 years.
Thomas Courtney, a 27-year teacher, characterized Barrera as “a moral compass” for the district, one who is in sync with teachers. “When I talk to him, I get a sense he knows what I don’t know,” about policies and finances, “and he understands all that I say about teaching.”
Current San Diego Unified board member Cody Petterson said Barrera is influential “because he thinks with a clear set of values, and so can make decisions with certainty more than other board members.”
In his first year on the board, in 2008, Barrera persuaded the board to pass a project labor agreement requiring building contractors to pay union-scale wages. A threat to organize a recall election against him fizzled, and, with unions’ support, the district passed the first of four school construction bonds after not passing one for a decade. Barrera orchestrated placing union representatives on the independent bond oversight committee.
Ties to labor unions
The son of a Colombian immigrant, Barrera’s own views have been shaped by two decades as a union leader and organizer. From 2013 to 2015, he served as secretary-treasurer of the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council. It represents the political interests of 135 unions, including San Diego Unified’s teachers and classified unions, raising concerns about potential conflicts of interest with Barrera’s service on the school board. An outside attorney advised the district that Barrera could legally hold both jobs, but cautioned that at times he may need to recuse himself.
Barrera is unapologetic in asserting that the interests of teachers are the interests of schools and students. The district has continued to pay 100% of health benefits for employees while raising pay significantly. From 2021-22 to 2024-25, the average pay for a teacher with a bachelor’s degree rose 14.2%, to $106,000 — $2,641 above the comparable average unified school district salary, according to Ed-Data.
Scott Davison, the executive director of the Carlsbad Education Alliance, disagrees with Barrera’s pro-teachers’ union approach.
“We laugh whenever we hear ‘the interests of teachers are the interests of students,’ because it’s simply not true,” he said. “The teachers unions’ sole purpose is to bargain for the salaries and benefits of their employees. And for every dollar you give to a teacher for their salary, that’s a dollar you take away from a student for improved services, improved curriculums.”
He disagrees with the legal counsel that there was no conflict of interest in leading the labor council while serving on the school board,because, he said, “you’re essentially negotiating on both sides of the bargaining table.”
A renegade on stocking budget reserves
Last year, Barrera sided with the California Teachers Association’s “We Can’t Wait” campaign, which argued that districts have been too conservative in building double-digit budget reserves over worries that the state’s highly volatile income tax revenues would collapse in a recession. Instead, San Diego Unified has kept only the state-required minimum 2% reserve, putting Barrera at odds with most superintendents, county education officials and the state’s fiscal advisory agency, the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, or FCMAT.
“I think the mistake that districts make is to build that reserve up with money that’s not meeting the needs of students right now,” he said. “Classified employees are saying, ‘We’re living out of our cars, and the district’s gonna have money sitting there in the bank.’ I think that’s wrong,” he said.
Barrera said he would make that case across the state as the state’s education advocate in chief if he became state superintendent. His positions earned CTA’s endorsement over other union-friendly legislators in a crowded June primary election.
Barrera has been “an incredible ally,” said CTA President David Goldberg in a statement.
But the California Charter Schools Association, which battled with CTA in previous state superintendent campaigns, also endorsed Barrera as “a pragmatic and collaborative leader,” while praising him for dedicating funding to charters in San Diego Unified’s construction bonds.
Since July 2024, Barrera has served as senior policy adviser to outgoing State Superintendent Tony Thurmond, focusing on early literacy, chronic absenteeism and teacher housing. The latter is a San Diego Unified priority. The district is putting out bids on the first of 3,000 housing units on district land that would be split between teachers and classified workers; it would be by far the biggest housing effort by a California district.
A district changes from red to blue
Barrera’s tenure coincides with demographic and political changes in San Diego and San Diego Unified. There is a more ethnically diverse population today than there was 30 years ago, and registered Democrats now outnumber registered Republicans 2 to 1. In subsequent elections of union-backed candidates, Barrera’s hard-fought 3-2 board majority in 2009 has become a more progressive, often unanimous, 5-0 vote on most decisions.
Many of the board’s goals reflected that shift. Martel’s school became a model for dozens of other community schools years before Gov. Gavin Newsom launched a community schools initiative with $4 billion in funding.
San Diego Unified developed an extensive ethnic studies curriculum that incorporates elements of the Liberated Ethnic Studies curriculum, which the Legislature discourages. The district requires that students pass one ethnic studies course to earn a high school diploma.
Test results and post-graduation readiness
The district’s students outperform the state when it comes to test scores. A higher ratio of San Diego Unified students — 81% — are low-income or English learners, compared with 66% statewide. Yet the district’s average scores on statewide assessments have been higher than the state average: 53.9% compared with 49.3% in English language arts and 48.9% in English language arts compared with 38.4% in math in 2026.
The district’s student-to-teacher ratio of 19 is 1.4 students fewer than the statewide and San Diego County average.
San Diego Unified has consistently tested at or near the top of the two dozen large urban districts that take the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. In 2024, it placed first in fourth and eighth grade reading, sixth in fourth grade math and second in eighth grade math.
Barrera downplayed the emphasis on test scores in an interview, instead pointing to the district’s college and career readiness metric on the California School Dashboard, released last week.
In 2009, San Diego Unified became one of the first districts in California to make completion of the A to G courses required for admission to the University of California and the California State University the default curriculum for the district. The district set 2016 as the start date, knowing implementation would take time.
Barrera said he pushed for a universal A to G curriculum as an equity issue to force equal access to college-level courses. In 2009, the district’s overall completion rate was 45% but only 25% for Black and Latino students. “We said this is a real problem. We are restricting access for too many kids,” Barrera said.
The shift to A to G had the effect of raising the overall course completion rate to 73% and 70% for Black and Latino students the year before the Covid pandemic, he said. “That really moved the needle,” he said.
But after the A-G completion rate plateaued, Supt. Fabiola Bagula suggested that the district create an alternative career pathway that some students would find more engaging, relevant and more likely to enable them to graduate. The non-A-G alternative would be aligned with the state’s college/career readiness metric on the California School Dashboard, which included credit for job apprenticeships and community college and career technical courses. The board adopted it in 2025.
“That was a tough one for me,” Barrera said. “The whole point of A to G for all was an equity argument based on disturbing data when I first came on to the board. But several high school principals recommended that for certain students, an alternative pathway to a diploma would be better, and so I agreed.”
In the latest dashboard result, 73.6% of San Diego seniors were termed college and/or career ready, 6.6 percentage points above 2025 and 18 percentage points higher than the statewide average.
“There are more important measures of student achievement, and college and career readiness is one. Constantly chasing test scores feeds the narrative that public schools are failing,” he said.
EdSource is California’s largest independent newsroom focused on education.
