Valerie Strauss writes at the Washington Post (12/28) “Answer Sheet” blog about California Gov. Jerry Brown’s vocal opposition to “the standardized-testing obsession that has come to dominate the school reform movement,” noting that he “refused to give in to threats by Education Secretary Arne Duncan to withhold” funding when Brown planned to abandon state testing in favor of Common Core-aligned field tests. The cites media reports in which Brown “said he opposes national education standards because ‘that’s just a form of national control.’” Strauss relates an anecdote in which Brown recently described a high school assignment “in which he had to write his impressions of a green leaf,” and quotes him saying, “You can’t put that on a standardized test.”