Gov. Jerry Brownish on Monday defended the country's decision to suspend land standardized tests this yr and instead offering students a practice test in the Mutual Core standards that's at present existence adult. And he gave no sign of steering away from a collision with the federal government over this effect.

"I feel that a test based on a dissimilar curriculum does not brand a lot of sense," he said during a news conference in Oakland. "We are investing $ane billion to adopt Mutual Core."

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Gov. Jerry Brown leaves an Oakland press briefing virtually training high schoolhouse students to build video games on Sept. 16, 2013. Credit: Lillian Mongeau, EdSource

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Update: State Board of Teaching President Michael Kirst and Superintendent of Public Educational activity Tom Torlakson acknowledge that state would not qualify for a exam waiver.

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The source of the conflict is Assembly Bill 484, which the Legislature approved last calendar week and Brown has promised to sign. By requiring that every district capable of administering a computer-based test give students a Mutual Core field or do test next spring, the bill will put California out of compliance with the federal No Child Left Behind law. NCLB mandates almanac testing in land standards in grades iii through 8 and grade 11 in math and English arts in club to mensurate schools' and individual students' operation. The field test will not produce results for federal accountability. Its purpose is to assist the examination developers create a valid assessment on the new standards in 2015, when California and other states would formally introduce it.

Only Chocolate-brown, who was at the Oakland School for the Arts, the charter schoolhouse he founded, indicated the heaven wouldn't fall if schools went a year without exam results for accountability purposes. "We've had test results for 12 years," he said.

Turning to the school'south executive director, Donn Harris, Brown asked, "Tin you handle a twelvemonth without examination results? I'thousand not worried." Harris agreed that the school has mas many means, beside standardized tests, to evaluate how students are performing.

U.S. Secretary of Didactics Arne Duncan, an advocate of the Common Core standards, has acknowledged the usefulness of the field test and said he would exempt schools, comprising up to xx percent of a state'southward enrollment, from also taking their state tests.

Merely California will be pressing the result by seeking a waiver for near districts from state tests in those grades. Those districts without the technology to administer the calculator-based field test would give neither the sometime test under country standards nor the Mutual Core examination – one reason for Duncan's opposition. The State Board of Education earlier this month authorized Board President Michael Kirst to work with the state Department of Education on the waiver request and handle negotiations with Duncan's staff.

In an unusual move a day before the Legislature was to vote on AB 484, Duncan issued a clear threat to penalize California if information technology passed the bill. Only he was cryptic about what the land would have to do to qualify for a statewide waiver, and later on the Legislature canonical the pecker anyway, he turned more than conciliatory.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, published Monday, Duncan called fining the country "a last resort."

"We want to exist flexible, we desire to be thoughtful," Duncan told the paper. "We don't want to be stuck. At that place are lots of different things happening across the country. I don't desire to be also hard and fast on any one of these things because I have not gone through every detail, every permutation."

Duncan also praised Brown for providing substantial money for teacher preparation and applied science needed to teach and examination the Common Cadre. "I give the governor tremendous credit," Duncan said. "He's put existent resources behind that."

Dark-brown in Oakland framed the disagreement over testing as part of the land'south larger effort, through the adoption of the Local Control Funding Formula, to move command over education from Washington and Sacramento to local school districts. And he hearkened back to a much earlier era every bit evidence. "How did we win World War Ii?" he asked rhetorically. "How did we exercise before the federal government intruded in instruction?"

Chocolate-brown was in Oakland on Monday to support Project A-Game, a $450,000 program funded past The California Endowment and the Entertainment Software Association, in which students in Oakland and Sacramento will learn about careers in the lucrative computer arts industry and create their own video games. The governor praised the attempt to help students brand the connexion betwixt math and science and electronic media. Students at the Eastward Oakland neighborhood center Youth Uprising  piloted the program.

John Fensterwald covers state education policy. Contact him and sign up for his tweets @jfenster.

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