Education Chief Candidate Has Wild Fix For College Kids Struggling With Grade-School Math

California superintendent candidate Richard Barrera says university professors should help students catch up on basic math rather than exclude them, rejecting a return to SAT requirements even when asked about students who struggle with fractions.

During a Sunday interview with NBC LA’s Conan Nolan, Barrera said that he would not support bringing back SAT requirements for schools within the University of California system.

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Nolan asked Barrera why he would not consider bringing back standardized testing, particularly after professors from prominent schools like UC San Diego and UC Berkeley complained that some incoming students lacked basic math skills, including the ability to work with fractions.

“Absolutely not,” Barrera was adamant. “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 pressed for clarification.

Barrera responded that students who had overcome barriers to attend college needed support to catch up, not exclusion.

“Listen, we’ve got students who are coming up from incredible experiences, first generation students overcoming so many barriers to be on the campus,” he explained. “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.”

The University of California system stopped requiring standardized testing — using either the SAT or the ACT — in 2020, largely due to concerns that the testing standards unfairly disadvantaged black, Hispanic, and low-income students.

But even as the professors are reporting higher and higher numbers of students who are wholly unprepared for the academic challenges at the university level, college applicants are reporting GPAs of 4.0 or higher in increased numbers as well — leading to concerns that grades are being inflated at the high school level without concern about how those students might fare later on in their academic careers.

Barrera currently serves as president of the San Diego Unified School Board — and senior policy adviser for special projects at the California Department of Education under State Superintendent Tony Thurmond — and is running against Chino Valley Unified School Board President Sonja Shaw to be Thurmond’s successor.

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