California’s frontrunner for state superintendent of public instruction says he would oppose bringing back standardized testing for students applying to University of California schools, even amid concerns students are struggling with basic math skills.
Richard Barrera, president of the San Diego Unified School Board, has served on the board since 2008 and currently works as a senior policy adviser to State Superintendent Tony Thurmond.
Barrera is running against Chino Valley Unified school board president Sonja Shaw to succeed Thurmond as California’s top elected education official.
Barrera has the backing of the powerful California Teachers Association in the race.
Barrera said he does not support reinstating the SAT as an admissions requirement for the UC system in an interview with NBC LA’s Conan Nolan on Sunday, Oct. 4,
Nolan pressed Barrera on that disconnect, pointing to concerns from math professors at UC Berkeley and UCLA who say some students are arriving on campus without basic math skills.
“Absolutely not,” Barrera said 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.”
Barrera’s position comes as questions mount over whether high school grades accurately reflect how prepared students are for college.
The number of college applicants reporting GPAs of 4.0 or higher has doubled over the past decade, even as state testing shows students are still struggling to recover from a post-pandemic plunge in reading and math performance.
The disconnect has fueled concerns about grade inflation, particularly as professors at some of California’s top universities say they are encountering students who struggle with basic math, including fractions.
The UC system dropped the SAT and ACT from admissions decisions beginning in 2020 amid longstanding criticism that standardized tests disadvantage low-income, Black and Latino students.
But critics of test-free admissions argue that eliminating the exams has left universities with fewer independent measures of students’ academic preparedness as high school GPAs have risen.
Education advocate Charles Cole, who attended California public schools before graduating high school in 2001, previously told The Post that grade inflation has been brewing for decades and has only grown worse in recent years.
Cole, who attended much of high school in Oakland, earned strong grades but said he felt betrayed when he arrived at a California State University and learned he needed remedial classes.
“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 state-mandated test results underscore the gap between high GPAs and academic proficiency. Results from the Smarter Balanced Summative Assessments, which measure proficiency in English and math, showed about 57% of California 11th graders met or exceeded standards in English during the 2024-25 school year, compared with just 30.5% in math.
Those figures have improved from pandemic-era lows of 54.8% in English and 27% in math during the 2021-22 school year, but remain generally below pre-pandemic levels, according to data from the California Department of Education.
