SAN FRANCISCO—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 parent-led 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.
