California’s terrible top education official wants to take over as governor
Zachary Faria
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California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond wants to run for governor. Arguably, no one in California deserves the job less.
Thurmond is gearing up to run for governor of California in 2026, already having filed campaign paperwork and registering “Tony Thurmond for Governor 2026.” He has spent the last 19 years jumping from election to election, running for seven different offices in that time frame. His ambition is only dwarfed by his toxicity, both in his policies and in his management style.
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Last week, Thurmond defended California’s excessive, unnecessary school closures as “the right measures to keep everyone safe.” That alone is disqualifying for any public office, let alone the governor of California. School closures were clearly wrong in the fall of 2020. In the fall of 2023, with everything we know now about how school closures did not prevent the spread of the virus and how they did destroy the educational and emotional development of children, defending school closures is flatly unacceptable.
It does not stop there for Thurmond. He is a culture warrior of the highest order, using his position to threaten school boards that think schools should inform parents if their students are adopting alternate transgender identities, a mental health matter that schools should absolutely not be hiding from parents. Thurmond went as far as to crash a school board meeting in Chino Valley to grandstand about one such policy.
The toxic politics carry into a toxic workplace. Thurmond’s tenure as superintendent saw high turnover and low morale in his office, with two dozen former employees, education consultants, and lobbyists detailing the conditions. According to Politico, Thurmond “allegedly humiliated and intimidated staff,” would accuse them of being insubordinate or disrespectful if they disagreed with him, and created conditions in which “aides walked on eggshells and cried on the job.”
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Thurmond represents all the worst aspects of California’s failing education system. He is professionally and politically toxic. He wants teachers and school officials to hide mental health information from parents about their own children. He does not care about students, their educational development, or their mental health, as evidenced by the fact that he still supports California’s prolonged school closures well after they have been proven to be anti-science and ineffective.
Thurmond belongs nowhere near his current job. He belongs nowhere near any job in education, given his record. And he certainly should never be given more power, which is what he is pursuing in his future run for governor. California could do better than Thurmond, but it would be almost impossible to do worse.