Antonio Villaraigosa

Bottom line: “When all is said and done, I took on the teachers union. I’ve taken on power before, and I will again.” K-12: When it comes to funding and other decisions, students must always come first, Villaraigosa said in a statement of his education plan.

While Villaraigosa has battled teachers unions for years over his support for charter schools, when it comes to quality education, “teachers are not the problem,” he said. “Well-paid and professionally trained teachers are the solution.”

But high-performing public charter schools “are laboratories for innovation and creativity” and should be available to low-income families, Villaraigosa said.

While he favors efforts to focus additional state money on the hardest-to-reach students — English learners, poor children, foster youths and those left behind — Villaraigosa says that money should come with strings.

“The money was for a purpose, not to be spread around like peanut butter,” with that targeted state funding now going to a variety of out-of-the-classroom expenses, he said. “It needs to go to those kids.”

Higher ed: Villaraigosa wants to see more state money going to community colleges, but also wants to see a better return.

“We’ve got to graduate more of our kids with a two-year degree, with a work skill if you will, (and) transfer more of them to four-year colleges,” he said in a recent podcast. “I know that some are opposed, but I’m open to the notion of maybe granting baccalaureate degrees in our community colleges as well.”

At an April forum in Los Angeles, Villaraigosa called for building a new CSU campus in Stockton and putting a medical school at UC Merced, arguing that the Central Valley is underserved when it comes to state higher-ed resources.