California tempers backlash while embracing Common Core

Testing boycotts will not deter Gov. Brown and education officials

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – While the Common Core education standards provoked political backlash and testing boycotts around the country this year, the state that educates more public school children than any other – California – was conspicuously absent from the debate.

Gov. Jerry Brown and California’s elected K-12 schools chief are united in their support of the embattled benchmarks. The heads of the state’s teachers’ unions, universities and business groups are on board, too. More than one-quarter of the 12 million students who were supposed to take new online tests linked to the standards this spring were Californians, but the technical glitches and parentled opt-out campaigns that roiled the exams’ rollout elsewhere did not surface widely here.

“I’m glad it’s not us,” state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, a former high school science teacher and state lawmaker, said of the anti-Common Core sentiment that has put his peers in many other places on the defensive.

The prevailing equanimity may stem most from what the state did not do, Common Core opponents and advocates in California agree: tie student test scores to teacher evaluations.

The 2012 decision cost the state $49 million from the federal Race to the Top grant program, as well as a reprieve from the sanctions in the 2001 No Child Left Behind law for schools defined as low-performing based on test results.

But the refusal scored the governor and state education officials points with teachers that staved off dissent over the new standards, California Federation of Teachers President Joshua Pechthalt said.

“When you don’t attach those high-stakes tests, then you’ve really cut much of the opposition,” Pechthalt said.