Jeremy Tate doesn’t wish to merely compete with the SAT. Instead he wants to replace the College Board and thereby, as he put it recently, “reclaim education rooted in truth, goodness, and beauty.”
Tate is the founder of the Classic Learning Test, an alternative standardized college-entrance exam that draws from Homer, Milton, Dante, and the other anthologized stars of Western Civ. He started the company in 2015 when he was working as a college counselor at an all-girls Catholic school near Baltimore. He worried then that students weren’t reckoning with literary and philosophical heavyweights and set about creating a test that might motivate them to explore the canon.
Are colleges going to embrace a test that would put students who haven’t had a classically oriented education at a disadvantage?
These days about 250 colleges accept the CLT, nearly all of them Christian colleges. Many of the students who take the CLT attend private Christian high schools or were home-schooled. While it’s become well-known in those circles, the CLT has struggled to make much headway outside that religious niche.
But that may be changing, thanks to Florida. A new law signed by the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, allows the CLT to be submitted in order to qualify for the Florida Bright Futures Scholarships Program. In addition, New College of Florida, which has found itself at the center of DeSantis’s controversial plans to overhaul higher ed, has said its admissions department will now accept the CLT. “New College is just the beginning with respect to using it for admissions purposes and demonstration of college readiness,” says Henry Mack, who was senior chancellor in the Florida Department of Education, but recently left to join a lobbying firm.
Why would Florida care about a fairly obscure test? Mack spelled out the rationale on Twitter recently, writing that the state is “restoring the classical aims of public education — starting by confining woke ideology to ‘the dustbin of history.’” In the same tweet, he posted a photo of himself and Tate, grinning broadly. “More to come!” he wrote. When I spoke to Mack, he said the CLT “aligns with the vision of education in Florida … because it uses works of Western philosophy and history that are essential to know if students are going to act as informed citizens in our constitutional republic.”
If the SAT aligned with the vision he refers to, then presumably another test wouldn’t be needed. Meanwhile Tate is straightforward in his criticism. When I asked him whether he thinks the College Board is inserting left-wing political views into its exams he replied: “Oh yeah.” Tate is intent on countering the bias he believes is evident in the reading sections of the SAT. “It’s about giving kids a real understanding of history rather than a distorted and warped one, which is what the College Board is giving them by censoring and filtering out things they don’t like or agree with,” he says.
It’s about giving kids a real understanding of history rather than a distorted and warped one, which is what the College Board is giving them by censoring and filtering out things they don’t like or agree with.
In response to that charge, the College Board sent a lengthy statement that said the reading sections are drawn from texts “in the public domain in the content areas of U.S. and world literature, social science, and science” and include primary sources “such as from founding documents like the Federalist papers” along with “articles from quality magazines or trade books.” According to the statement, the passages it selects “don’t include highly charged political topics, which could be disruptive to the test taker.”
I asked Tate for an example of the SAT’s left-wing bias, and he mentioned that a previous test contained an excerpt from a speech by Bernie Sanders. Tate is not the first to claim that the test leans left. In 2017, a high-school senior complained in a Wall Street Journal column that an SAT essay question asked students to analyze an argument in favor of the Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act written by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat from upstate New York (the SAT has since ditched the essay component). DeSantis recently criticized the College Board’s Advanced Placement course on African American studies for having a “political agenda” that’s “on the wrong side of the line for Florida standards.” (The College Board later removed subject matter to which DeSantis and other conservatives had objected.)
A perusal of three SAT practice tests doesn’t reveal much in the way of ideological skew. One excerpt from a 1938 essay by Virginia Woolf considers the position of women in society and states accurately: that women were often excluded from higher education. Another passage from 1837 argues Southern women should speak out against slavery. Opposition to slavery and allowing women to attend college aren’t exactly polarizing political opinions — at least not anymore — and the other passages were about topics like the collapse of honey-bee colonies, public transportation, and space mining.
It’s about building up that fluency, which I think rewards students who have had that kind of education. If they’re used to reading Shakespeare and they’re used to reading Dante or Saint Augustine, they’re going to do pretty well.
Part of Tate’s critique focuses on what the SAT is leaving out. Rather than giving high-school seniors more or less random essays, why not present excerpts from some of the greatest texts ever written? As the CLT website puts it: “No more meaningless reading passages stripped of beauty, rich vocabulary, virtue, and intellectual rigor.” Tate argues that if college entrance exams feature important works of literature, high schools will want to add those works to the curriculum. “It’s about building up that fluency, which I think rewards students who have had that kind of education,” he says. “If they’re used to reading Shakespeare and they’re used to reading Dante or Saint Augustine, they’re going to do pretty well.”
At the moment the concept of standardized testing is under fire, with lots of colleges continuing the test-optional policies that started during Covid and some ditching the SAT and ACT altogether. Are those same colleges going to embrace a test that would put students who haven’t had a classically oriented education at a disadvantage?
Another question is which works should be considered classics. The CLT has a list of authors from whose work it pulls about two-thirds of the test’s reading-comprehension sections. The 150 or so names in the CLT’s author bank are divided into ancient, medieval, and modern. You’ll find plenty of overlap between the authors listed by the CLT and the required reading in so-called great-books programs at St. John’s College and Columbia University, names like Aeschylus, Euclid, Virgil, and Chaucer, along with modern authors like Kafka, Hemingway, Orwell, and Dostoyevsky.
Other choices are more curious. For instance, neither James Joyce or Marcel Proust makes the CLT cut, but C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, both popular fiction writers and Christian apologists, do. It’s not a slight to point out that Lewis and Chesterton aren’t usually seen as essential to Western culture in the same way as Proust and Joyce. One of the Classic Learning Test exams I reviewed had a section from a 1984 Apostolic letter by Pope John Paul II, a text that would almost certainly be unfamiliar to non-Catholics. If Tate argues that the SAT is peddling a subtle political agenda, it’s worth asking whether the CLT is — at least sometimes — slipping in a Christian one.
“We’re not a classical Christian test,” Tate says. “We’re a test that’s far more inclusive than the SAT and ACT.” He points out that Darwin and Nietzsche, two very notable non-Christians, are in the author bank. As for the suggestion that the CLT has a conservative bent, Tate notes that a prior test contained a passage from Susan Rice, who was national security adviser in the Obama administration.
The list has been revised since CLT was founded, adding more women and people of color. Those revisions were driven by Angel Parham, president of CLT’s board of academic advisers and an associate professor of sociology and senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. Parham, who has argued that teaching the classics shouldn’t be conflated with espousing right-wing cultural views, has pushed to expand the list, including authors like Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, and Anna Julia Cooper, who was born into slavery and became a prominent sociologist.
Parham says that there have been internal disagreements about which authors to include and that she remembers a “particular tussle around Chesterton.” Her primary interest is in having students read ”texts that have this heft in terms of their historical and cultural contributions.” She’s bothered by the perception in some quarters that the CLT is an “anti-woke” alternative. “It just conjures up a whole series of culture-war imagery that people line up behind, so it becomes very difficult to get a fair hearing or for people to see it with non-ideological eyes,” she says.
If the CLT is going to replace the SAT, or even make a dent in its dominance, it will have to reach beyond Christian colleges and a single state-college system. Tate knows that. And he believes it’s starting to happen, thanks to the boost in publicity from Florida’s endorsement. “We’ve already been in communication with a number of other states, and we think that probably two or three will be in legislation next year as well,” he says. “I’m limited in what I can say, but we’re very excited and confident about Texas.”