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It’s clear what the next state superintendent will no longer do upon assuming office in January: run the California Department of Education. A new education commissioner appointed by the next governor will take on that responsibility under legislation Gov. Gavin Newsom signed in June.

What’s unclear is what the next state superintendent will actually do. Whoever wins next month’s election for the job — either Sonja Shaw, president of the Chino Valley Unified school board, or Richard Barrera, president of the San Diego Unified’s school board — will spend the next four years creating a new job template for future state superintendents.

Four times between 1928 and 1968, voters turned down opportunities to get rid of the superintendent position altogether. Assembly Bill 181 took a different tack: It consolidated responsibility for managing the education department and overseeing school improvement under a new education commissioner. It tacitly acknowledged that the elected state superintendent would remain an independent voice, free to roam California critiquing the state of education, advocating for positions they ran on and lobbying the Legislature to adopt them. 

The bill also granted the next superintendent some additional responsibilities. The person will become the first nongovernor-appointed member of the State Board of Education, and a member of the Community Colleges’ Board of Governors. The law provided initial funding for a small staff of about a dozen deputies and clerical staff.

But AB 181 was intentionally vague about other, bigger responsibilities, in part because Newsom and key Assembly leaders who authored the bill couldn’t agree on additional roles. 

Changes to the role haven’t been central to either candidate’s campaign. Resolving the uncertainty in the new role will be a big part of the job, and the candidates have so far offered contrasting perspectives on how they’d approach the issue.

Barrera has expressed ambivalence about AB 181. He acknowledges the need for restructuring and shifting the department to the education commissioner. He said he’s open to discussing new roles for the job. But ultimately, he said, “you, the Legislature and you, the governor, you don’t get to define my job.” 

Instead, he has been spreading his vision for the job. One idea that could rattle the next governor is for the state superintendent to confer every fall with local superintendents, educators and parents to create a first draft of a state education budget before the governor lays out the full state budget in early January. Being proactive, he said, would be better “than spending the next six months reacting to what the governor and Legislature propose.” 

Shaw charges that AB 181 is unconstitutional, and said she will sue California to keep the state superintendency as it was, though such a case would face over three decades of legal precedent. She has framed the move as retaliatory against her campaign. 

“Voters don’t want to just elect a mascot,” Shaw said in an EdSource questionnaire. “They created this office as an independent voice for kids and parents. Gavin Newsom’s budget trailer bill turns this office into a figurehead and hands the Department of Education to a political appointee.”

Long-standing debate over ‘double-headed’ system 

The catalyst for AB 181 was a report last December by the nonprofit research center Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) that called for overhauling the education governance system. 

The problem, PACE said, echoing findings of numerous reports over the decades, was a split authority. The governor and State Board of Education created policies and programs, while an elected state superintendent, often legislators lacking in management experience, carried them out. No one was accountable for running programs well.

In a webinar last week, Brooks Allen, the executive director of the State Board of Education and the governor’s education policy advisor, said Newsom came to recognize this “fragmentation” threatened to undermine potentially “transformative” programs like transitional kindergarten and community schools. In his state of the state address in January, Newsom adopted PACE’s fix. A commissioner with a management background would oversee the California Department of Education, while the state superintendent focused on other duties. PACE envisioned an independent evaluator of school programs, while Newsom favored the superintendent as a bridge builder for all branches of education.

AB 181 listed those and other ideas as possibilities and said the next state superintendent and the new education commissioner should spend the first six months of 2027 negotiating a job description to bring to the Legislature in the fall of 2027 for funding and statutory changes. 

Would the next superintendent go along?

The unstated assumption is that future superintendents would be interested and qualified for what PACE, the Legislature and governor had in mind. 

Shaw declined interview requests for this story, but wrote in an EdSource survey that, if elected, she “has no intention of laying down.”

“I would reshape the job around three things the new law still leaves standing: the bully pulpit, systemic accountability and a voice on boards that actually set policy,” she wrote.

Julie Marsh, a USC professor of education policy who co-authored the influential PACE report, said voters evaluating the superintendent candidates should look for someone who is independent and able to reach conclusions that might rankle their allies. But a superintendent shouldn’t be so independent and isolated that they can’t connect with stakeholders to solve whatever problems they might identify. 

“Can they give constructive criticism while maintaining some of the relationships they need to get these things solved?” Marsh said.

Barrera said he agrees with much of what is in AB 181, adding, “I want to work with the commissioner to figure out the structure that’s necessary.” 

“I really am looking forward to help build linkages between pre-K to 12 and higher education,” he said. 

But he said that as an independently elected state official, he will “keep an arm’s length” from the Legislature and governor. 

“For instance, if part of my job is evaluating,” he said, “I don’t want to do that in an academic way, and I certainly don’t want the Legislature to decide, ‘Here are the programs that we want evaluated, and you go and hire a researcher and deliver a report back to us, and then we’ll decide what to do with that.’ That is not going to be the way that I approach this role.” 

Like past state superintendent candidates, Shaw and Barrera have focused their campaigns on selling voters on their positions on issues and not on the dramatic changes to the role of superintendent. Morgan Polikoff, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education, doubts the changes will affect how most voters are viewing the race — if they’re thinking about it at all.

“If you surveyed education policy professors in the state of California about the shift, I would be surprised if more than half of them could accurately describe what the change was,” he said. “So I think the average parent or voter has absolutely no idea.”

This story was originally published by EdSource. Sign up for their daily newsletter.