Chino Valley School Board President Sonja Shaw scrambled to the top of the heap among ten candidates for state superintendent of public instruction.
Her first place finish qualifies her for the run-off in November against the second place finisher, Richard Barrera, whom she bested by more than a quarter of a million votes.
Despite her impressive showing in the primary and her exploitation of the hot button issue of parental notification, she yet faces an uphill battle in November as a consequence of her party affiliation.
California Superintendent of Public Instruction is officially a nonpartisan office, and candidates are not identified by party on the ballot. Nevertheless, partisanship plays a huge role in California politics and her standing as a member of the GOP has made her a target of the state’s dominant Democrats.
Indeed, of the ten individuals in the superintendent’s race Shaw was the only Republican, or at least the only one proudly identifier herself as such and the only one endorsed by the California Republican Party. This contrasts with five of the candidates who emphasized their Democratic Party affiliation.
Indeed, it was the glut of Democrats in the race, which led to the split in the majority Democrat vote statewide that carried much of the day for Shaw, who predictably received well over 90 percent of the Republican vote.
Shaw distinguished herself as well as a consequence of the groundbreaking action of the school board she has headed since 2023, shortly after she was elected in the November 2022 election.
The state’s Democrats, including one of the candidates in the race against her this year, Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi, who represents the 66th Assembly District in Los Angeles County, presented her with an opportunity to make herself known. In March 2023, then-Assemblyman Bill Essayli, a Republican, introduced legislation he had authored, Assembly Bill 1314. At that time, California law had dictated a policy that in public school settings, teachers and faculty were to respect the decision of students to define their gender in accordance with their belief rather than their biology. This meant that teachers were prohibited from informing the parents of the students in their classes if those students were making a “gender transition.” Essayli’s Assembly Bill 1314 sought to change that, calling for a policy change eliminating the imposition of a requirement that school officials keep parents in the dark about the gender reidentification of their children.
At its April 7 meeting, the Chino Valley Unified School Board took up consideration of a resolution to endorse Essayli’s bill. The item brought hundreds of students, former students, parents and other interested community members to the meeting to express their support or opposition for the resolution as proposed as well as their support or opposition to Assembly Bill 1314. Because of an over-capacity crowd, not everyone who had shown up was allowed into the meeting chamber and at least some of those who wanted to address the board on the topic were unable to be heard.
Ultimately, the board voted 4-to-1, with James Na, Andrew Cruz, Jon Monroe and Shaw, who was serving as board president, prevailing. A week later, AB 1314 died a quiet legislative procedural death when Assemblyman Muratsuchi, the chairman of the Assembly Education Committee, declined to set a hearing date for the bill before his committee, such that the bill was not given a chance to be considered by the entire Assembly.
Essayli acknowledged that the Democrats had the votes to kill his bill, but that they did not have the ability to suppress parents’ voices at the local level, and he called upon parents and others who support the concept of involving parents in guiding their children through their adolescence to encourage local school districts to enact policies to achieve the goal of Assembly Bill 1314.
The Chino Unified School District, led by the school board and Shaw, did just that, becoming the first district in California to pass a parental notification policy in those cases where students assumed a gender on campus and in classrooms that were different from the gender assigned them at birth and listed on their birth certificates. The Democrats in Sacramento, including Governor Gavin Newsom, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and California Attorney General Rob Bonta reacted against what the Chino Unified School District had done, filing suit to keep the policy from being actuated. The Democratic-dominated state legislature then passed legislation preventing school districts from passing parental notification policies. Children should have the right to privacy, they argued. Telling parents that their children were changing their gender could submit those students to physical, psychological and emotional abuse at the hands of intolerant parents, the Democrats argued. In the showdown with Shaw and the Chino Unified School District over the gender transition issue, the state government prevailed and Shaw and the school district lost.
At the same time, however, large numbers of parents not only in Chino Valley but around the state and the nation found themselves siding with Shaw and the district rather than California’s governor, its attorney general, is superintendent of public education and its legislature. A parallel matter in which two teachers in the Escondido School District sued in federal court over being prevented by their district from telling parents that their children were transitioning into a different sexual identity than their original biology was resolved with a federal judge siding with the teachers. Shaw and the Chino Unified School District were not seen as bigots and in the negative light Newsom, Thurmond, Bonta, Muratsuchi and the rest of California’s legislature were seeking to cast them in but rather as courageous public education officials standing up for parents rights. Surveys showed that on the parental notification issue, more than 90 percent of Republican voters and over 60 percent of Democratic voters sided with Shaw and Essayli rather than with Newsom Thurmond, Bonta and Muratsuchi. Shaw was soon being interviewed by newspaper reporters and television personalities from around California and throughout the nation. It was in that context that she ran for California superintendent of pubic instruction.
In the course of the race, her position on parental notification became even more widely known than it already was.
As of the most recent tally of the votes in the race, Shaw had 1,725,542 votes or 22.7 percent. Closest to her was Richard Barrera, Democrat, with 1,543,173 votes or 20.3 percent. In third was another Democrat, Nichelle Henderson, with 731,538 votes or 9.6 percent. Wendy Castaneda Leal, who took positions similar to the Democratic line but who has not openly identified as a Democrat, capture 670,100 votes or 8.8 percent for fourth place. Muratsuchi place fifth with 639,817 votes or 8.4 percent, a clear indication that when it comes to entrusting control over certain policies with regard to the social atmosphere surrounding the education of children, California’s voters favored Shaw by better than a two-to-one margin over the man who prevented the legislature from considering Essayli’s bill to give parents a chance to know how their children are conducting themselves at school. Others in the race were Anthony Rendon, a Democrat who was the second-longest serving speaker of the Assembly in California history, who managed to bring in 618,081 votes or 8.1 percent and Josh Newman, a Democrat who served in the California State Senate from 2016 to 2018 and again from 2020 to 2024. He received 518,353 votes of 6.8 percent. Frank Lara, a socialist and unionist, garnered 572,436 or 7.5 percent. Ainye Long had 421,288 votes or 5.5 percent.
While Shaw proved the top vote-getter, those who are clearly identified as Democrats carried 62 percent of the vote, while others equally or more liberal/progressive than the Democrats claimed 16.3 percent of the vote. It thus appears that Shaw is a longshot in the November contest. She has taken some positions that are outside the mainstream with California’s voters. She is religious and is a champion of prayer in schools. As school board president, she proposed a revision of the district’s library media center policy to allow parents to challenge “non-curricular reading materials.”
She touts herself as a conservative and has been endorsed by the Republican Party, which will no doubt bring in Republican votes for her but will also activate the state’s Democratic voters.
On the order of 45 percent of California’s registered voters are Democrats, totaling around 10.4 million people. California has about 23.1 million registered voters, with Democrats comprising roughly 44.9–45.3 percent, which translates to approximately 10.4 million registered Democratic voters Republicans constitute roughly 25 percent of the state’s of registered voters, or roughly 5.8 million people.
Barrera is currently president of the San Diego Unified School District Board. He proudly identifies as a Democrat and is endorsed by the California Democratic party and other Democratic-aligned organizations. He also has strong support from labor unions such as the California Teachers Association.
Shaw’s most likely path to victory would be to ignore party affiliation and seek to tar Barrera with the Democratic Party’s embrasure of the policy of preventing parents know about the gender reidentification of their children in public school settings. That is the one issue of vulnerability in his Democratic identification.
If Shaw can achieve election as the superintendent of public instruction, she would follow in the footsteps of Max Rafferty, who achieved that post whose early experience as an educator took place in San Bernardino County. Rafferty was a vice-principal, principal, and school superintendent at Big Bear High School and with the Big Bear Lake School District from 1948 to 1951. He was the superintendent at sparsely populated Saticoy in Ventura County from 1951 to 1955, Needles from 1955 to 1961, and moved on to upscale La Cañada in Los Angeles County in 1961 and 1962.
He became a newspaper columnist, espousing conservatism.
In 1962, he was elected to the nonpartisan office of California education superintendent, defeating Los Angeles school board president Ralph Richardson. He held this office for two terms, from 1963 to 1971.
Rafferty established himself politically as a self-described “far right reactionary, who earned the moniker of “America’s outspoken antiprogressive educator.” His reputation grew beyond the Golden State, as he attacked busing, sex education and the “New Left.” He began writing and publishing books to propound his view that the dual concepts of liberalism and progressive education were anathema to the American way of life. He urged a “return to the fundamentals” in education. Schools should, he insisted, focus on phonics, memorization and drill; utilize American history and children’s classics in teaching from the early grades forward, and drop psychology and “life adjustment” approaches from education. As California’s school superintendent he issued a dictum from on high that several contemporary books such as Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice and Leroi Jones’s Dutchman were obscene, and he sought to revoke the teaching certificate of any teacher who used such works. He sought to have the Dictionary of American Slang removed from school libraries.
Politically, he was known as an “articulate spokesman for the far right” who had a “nationwide reputation as a Fourth-of-July style orator and writer.”
In 1968 Rafferty challenged and defeated incumbent Republican Senator Thomas H. Kuchel, whom Rafferty branded as a “moderate,” in the Republican primary election. This has been described as “one of the biggest primary upsets in Senate history.” Rafferty ran as a conservative, overcoming Kuchel among “red meat” Republicans. He then had to face Alan Cranston, the former state controller in the general election. He lost.
-Mark Gutglueck