Make California Post a Preferred Source Oops. A honcho with the LA teachers union (UTLA) is saying the quiet part out loud.
As the California Post reported: Julie Van Winkle, UTLA AFT vice president and AFT 1021 president, was caught on camera addressing the Nov. 3 election for state schools chief.
She urged supporters to help turn out votes for the UTLA-endorsed longtime union lackey, Richard Barrera.
And she called his opponent, Sonja Shaw, a “real threat” and “obviously a huge problem for us.”
That’s the takeaway for voters in this race: Shaw won’t take direction from the union bosses. Barrera will.
This, in a district plagued by poor student-learning outcomes, routine labor strife and years of financial mismanagement.
The record cries out for reform — not more of the same failure.
It’s true that Shaw, who’s shown guts standing up for girls and parents as president of the Chino Valley Unified school board, would be a disruptor by her presence alone.
But only because her common-sense platform shows how far the state’s schools have run off the rails.
Shaw stands for restoring academic rigor. (Why do schools exist again?)
She stands for protecting parents’ right to know what’s happening with their kids in school. (Recall how educators for years blamed poor learning on uninvolved parents; now that schools are teaching gender ideology, parents are supposed to butt out.)
And she stands for protecting girls, their sports and their locker rooms from biological boys (a universal no-brainer not so long ago).
Shaw would, in effect, push to replace the adults’ ideological indulgences with kid-centered rigor in the basics: reading, writing and math.
While adults are busy authorizing strikes — as LA teachers did this year — and demanding ever-more unaffordable largesse from taxpayers, the kids are busy … not learning enough.
Per official state testing, just 46% of LAUSD students were proficient in English in 2025.
In math, a pitiful 37% of LAUSD pupils showed proficiency.
Sixty-three percent of LAUSD students can’t meet math standards, and Sonja Shaw’s the threat?
The real threat from Shaw, of course, is to the dismal union-first status quo.
Newsom recognized as much when he saw the results of the June primary: Shaw was the top vote-getter in the race for schools chief.
So the governor and Dem legislators brazenly stripped power and oversight authority from the office of the state superintendent of schools.
(That’s Dem politics for you: Faced with losing? Change the rules.)
What does it say that California’s schools chief will no longer run the Department of Education, yet a Shaw win would still be “a huge problem” for UTLA?
Van Winkle works in a failing school district. Yet she doesn’t want change or improvement or fresh ideas.
What’s striking is not that the union head thinks this way. It’s that she said it while being recorded.
