Sonja Shaw, a right-wing school board president, came in first in the race for State Superintendent of Public Instruction in the recent election in California. She received 25% of the vote and is heading for a run-off against Richard Berrara, also a school board president, who received about 19% of the vote.
Shaw was supported by the far-right group Moms for Liberty. She was been outspoken in opposing transgender athletes who compete against females.
Howard Blume wrote in The Los Angeles Times:
Sonja Shaw — a Trump-aligned Republican whose public profile rose as she became identified with culture-war causes, including banning transgender athletes from girls’ sports — has emerged as the leading vote-getter in the June primary for California’s superintendent of public instruction.
With all precincts at least partially reporting Wednesday, Shaw, with 24.9% of the tallied votes, was well ahead of Democrat Richard Barrera, who had 18.9% of the votes. Even with vote-counting ongoing, that lead would be difficult to surmount.
Both Shaw, 43, and Barrera, 59, are school board presidents.
Shaw heads the elected Board of Education for Chino Valley Unified in San Bernardino County, a diverse but substantially conservative inland portion of Southern California…
Among its high-profile actions, the Chino Valley board majority put forward a policy that would require parents to be notified if their child expressed gender-identity issues at school. Shaw and her allies also approved a policy that allows parents to challenge the content of library books.
In the primary, Shaw was greatly helped by a candidate field that included seven Democrats, including veteran legislators and local school district officials…
Barrera heads the school board of San Diego Unified, the state’s second-largest school district, serving an area with liberal leanings, but that is also politically diverse.
An obvious difference for Barrera was a $5-million independent campaign on his behalf from the California Teachers Assn., which he acknowledged Wednesday morning.
“The CTA campaign made all the difference and it’s based on a long track record and partnership that I’ve had with educators in San Diego,” Barrera said.…
Barrera sees the teachers union support as emblematic of a positive vision he has for education that will unite most voters around his campaign in November…
Positioned in a runoff against one Democrat — in a state where Democrats dominate — makes for a challenging campaign for Shaw.
“Tonight is not the finish line,” Shaw said. “It’s the beginning of the final stretch.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Culture wars allow a very small percentage of the population to control a very large percentage of the wealth produced increasingly by machines and sold to the majority of participants in the economy. This very small economic elite has been successful recently in persuading about a quarter of the population that their lives are threatened by the existence of a very small percentage of the population. These oligarchs have leveraged their power gained from a minority—the people who fear others—to make it OK for local school boards to ban certain books, to make it acceptable for troops to wander in Washington DC at a massive cost, to make it just fine that the amount of money we used to spend feeding needy people is now designated to pay people convicted in court of doing violence intended to overthrow a free and fair election, and to make vast corruption at the highest levels of government normalized.
My fear now is that there is so much money invested in corruption of government in general that interruption of this economy will disrupt the national economy in general, dooming any attempt to clean up this mess.
The school board elections are an indication of how deep in society this corruption exists,
LikeLiked by 2 people
Since there were a number of candidates in this race, hopefully Barrera will be the run-off candidate who will get the majority of votes that were spread out among the other rivals in the primary. However, Shaw will likely be backed by lots of billionaires that despise public education, and they will flood the race with dark money. https://calmatters.org/education/2026/06/primary-election-california-superintendent/
LikeLiked by 1 person
Shaw probably maxed out with the right wing vote.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Let’s hope so. I don’t think a lot of people know who the School Superintendent candidates are prior to the election. There was so much focus on the governor race and the LA mayoral race, not much attention was spent on the down ballot candidates. I live here in CA and know who they both are, but fingers crossed people get the message in time for the general in November.
LikeLike
It’s difficult to believe this happened. It was an unprecedented event. The California Federation of Teachers endorsed Al Maratsuchi for superintendent, as did the California School Employees Association. I went around successfully convincing a whole bunch of people to vote for Muratsuchi. Then, the biggest and best union (now that UTLA is lately struggling with some internal divisions among the officers, I’m aggrieved to say), the California Teachers Association endorsed Richard Barrera. So, I went around trying to undo my campaigning for Maratsuchi, only partly successfully. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in the confusion.
The unions will all be united now, though! A Moms For Liberty superintendent of public instruction in California indeed. Ha! Never happen, not in a million years. Fear not.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Respectfully, when you write, Sonja Shaw “has been outspoken in opposing transgender athletes who compete against females,” this is misleading and incorrect.
Correction: She was been outspoken in supporting female athletes to enjoy fair, safe, female-only sports.” She’s not “opposing transgender athletes.” The only people at issue are males, and she’s not even opposing them – she just wants them to stay in the male sports lane, where they belong.
Female trans-identified athletes already stay in the female category because they know that boys are bigger, stronger, and faster, as everyone used to. If this were not true – if boys were not bigger, stronger, and faster – we would not need the female category. And if adults were not bigger, stronger, and faster children, we wouldn’t need youth categories, either. But we do. Categories expand opportunities for everyone. They include everyone by excluding people who have unfair advantages.People have become so indoctrinated, they tend to believe that “transgender athletes” are some special sort of people who need special protections and special privileges. People tend to believe that “transgender people” have somehow transformed their sex-based bodies into something else entirely. But they have not. Mammals cannnot change sexes, and very few male athletes even bother to suppress their testosterone — which still does not render them female.
I’m not hateful, not Republican, and not anti-trans. I’m just correcting the facts. I’m also standing up for female athletes and those who support them to have their own sports, and own private, safe, locker rooms. This used to be an obvious position, not associated with Trump or Republicans. In fact, it’s Democrats who have historically supported Title IX and women’s sports. Females still deserve our own sports and spaces without male people, regardless of what those males believe, say, or want. And regardless of politics.
Once you realize that “transgender athletes” in this context always means males, everything changes. I hope.
LikeLike
Does she also support book bans in school libraries?
LikeLiked by 1 person
DO YOU? Would you permit “Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality” by Helen Joyce in school libraries? “Material Girls” by Kathleen Stock ? And, “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” by journalist Abigail Shrier?
OR, are you only concerned about book bans when they concern books promoting gender identity ideology and transgenderism?
LikeLike
I don’t believe in book bans. Period.
LikeLiked by 1 person