On the eve of the State of the State address by Governor Jerry Brown, Sue Burr, at left, executive director of the State Board of Education and Brown's top education adviser, speaking at the annual School Services of California workshop that advises district officials on the budget for the upcoming school year, said Brown will seek to reduce student testing and instead push districts to focus on a broader array of subject areas, reports Kevin Yamamura in the Sacramento Bee's "Capitol Alert".
"We think there's way, way too much testing in our system right now," Burr said. "Just as an example, a 10th grade student takes 15 hours' worth of tests. So that sophomore is losing 15 hours of their instructional program."
Burr said that while some testing is necessary for measuring schools, Brown will ask lawmakers to "take (hours) away from testing and give it back to instruction."
On October 10, 2011, Brown vetoed SB 547, by Senate Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, which would have replaced the Academic Performance Index, assigned to schools based solely on standardized test scores (and a heavy focus on math and english), with an " Educational Quality Index" that would have added more metrics to evaluate an individual school's performance.
In his veto message, Brown wrote, "SB 547 certainly would add more things to measure, but it is doubtful that it would actually improve our schools. Adding more speedometers to a broken car won't turn it into a high-performance machine."
However, according to Burr, Brown recognizes how narrow the curriculum has become for many schools under pressure to perform well on the standardized tests:
We've spent way too much time over the last several years narrowing our curriculum to English language arts and mathematics," Burr said. "While those are critically important, we can't ignore history. We can't ignore science. We can't ignore civics. We can't ignore the arts."
She also noted that Brown wants to improve educator performance by focusing on all teachers and school leaders, not just rewarding top performers and firing the worst. "We think that's a wrongheaded conversation," she said. "We must build the capacity of all of our teachers."
Burr didn't provide specific details of Brown's proposals, she said, because Brown was preparing to "roll these out tomorrow in his State of the State."
Written for California's Children by Elizabeth J Carlyle.
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