California School Board Candidate Opposes Restoring Standardized Tests

Richard Barrera, the leading candidate for California superintendent of public instruction, says he would oppose restoring standardized testing for students seeking admission to University of California campuses, even as concerns grow over declining basic math skills.

Barrera has served on the San Diego Unified School Board since 2008 and is currently a senior policy adviser to State Superintendent Tony Thurmond.

He is running against Sonja Shaw, president of the Chino Valley Unified school board, to succeed Thurmond as California’s top elected education official.

Barrera’s campaign has received the endorsement of the influential California Teachers Association.

During an interview with NBC LA’s Conan Nolan on Sunday, Oct. 4, Barrera said he does not support reinstating the SAT as an admissions requirement for the UC system.

Nolan challenged that position by citing concerns from math professors at UC Berkeley and UCLA, who say some students are arriving on campus without a grasp of fundamental math concepts.

“Absolutely not,” Barrera replied when asked whether the SAT should return. “So math teachers at UCLA and Berkeley and every place else, part of your job that you get paid by the taxpayers to do is to teach our kids.”

“Teach them fractions when they’re at the preeminent institutions of higher learning in the country?” Nolan responded.

“Listen, we’ve got students who are coming up from incredible experiences, first generation students overcoming so many barriers to be on the campus,” Barrera said. “Those students are capable of learning quickly. What they need is a little support to be caught up. What they don’t need is to be excluded.”

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Barrera’s comments come as questions intensify over whether high school grades provide an accurate picture of students’ readiness for college-level work.

The share of college applicants reporting GPAs of 4.0 or higher has doubled over the past decade, while state assessments show that students continue to struggle to recover from pandemic-era declines in reading and math performance.

That contrast has heightened concerns about grade inflation, especially after professors at some of California’s leading universities reported teaching students who have difficulty with basic concepts such as fractions.

The UC system stopped considering SAT and ACT scores in admissions decisions beginning in 2020, following years of criticism that standardized tests disadvantage low-income, Black and Latino students.

Opponents of test-free admissions, however, argue that dropping the exams has removed an independent measure of academic preparation at a time when high school GPAs are increasing.

Education advocate Charles Cole, who attended California public schools and graduated from high school in 2001, previously told The Post that grade inflation had been developing for decades and has worsened in recent years.

Cole attended much of high school in Oakland and earned strong grades, but said he felt misled after enrolling at a California State University and discovering that he needed remedial courses.

“Those classes were fairly easy for me. It didn’t take a lot,” Cole said of earning A’s in high school. “I’m happy and grateful for the grades because it helped me get into college. But the level of preparation was a huge letdown.”

California’s standardized assessment results highlight the gap between high GPAs and demonstrated proficiency. During the 2024-25 school year, about 57% of the state’s 11th graders met or exceeded standards in English on the Smarter Balanced Summative Assessments, compared with just 30.5% in math.

The results represent an improvement from pandemic-era lows of 54.8% in English and 27% in math during the 2021-22 school year, but both subjects remain generally below pre-pandemic performance levels, according to California Department of Education data.