Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

As I warned months ago, the entire point of Florida GOP Gov. ROn Desantis picking a fight directly with the College Board and AP Black History classes was to serve as cause for evicting all of the College Board's products from Florida schools and universities, including the SAT college entrance exam, and to replace it with the right-wing Christian Dominionist version.

 

The Classic Learning Test is the college admissions exam that most students have never heard of. An alternative to the SAT and ACT for only a small number of mostly religious colleges, the test is known for its emphasis on the Western canon, with a big dose of Christian thought.

But on Friday, Florida’s public university system, which includes the University of Florida and Florida State University, is expected to become the first state system to approve the Classic Learning Test, or CLT, for use in admissions.

“We are always seeking ways to improve,” said Ray Rodrigues, the chancellor of the State University System of Florida, noting that the system, which serves a quarter million undergraduates, was the largest in the country to still require an entrance exam.

It’s the latest move by Gov. Ron DeSantis to shake up the education establishment, especially the College Board, the nonprofit behemoth that runs the SAT program.

Governor DeSantis, a Republican presidential candidate, has already rejected the College Board’s Advanced Placement course on African American studies, and sparred over content on gender and sexuality in A.P. Psychology.

Now, at a time when the College Board faces a dwindling number of students taking the SAT, Governor DeSantis is giving a big lift to an upstart competitor.

Jeremy Tate, the founder of Classic Learning Initiatives, the company that developed the test, insisted that the CLT is apolitical. It’s an effort, he said, to avoid educational fads and expose students to rich intellectual material.

The company, however, describes the CLT as part of “the larger educational freedom movement of our time” — language that echoes that of conservative supporters of private-school vouchers and tax credits for home-schoolers. The “end goal,” the company says, is “promoting a classical curriculum.”

After a century of dominance by the College Board and the nonprofit ACT — which administers the test of the same name — the emergence of an alternative is “healthy and overdue,” said Frederick Hess, director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank. “It’s all for the best if this becomes a more vibrant marketplace.”

There has been pushback. The College Board and ACT say that there is little research that shows that the CLT can accurately assess college readiness. Some classics scholars say that the CLT’s vision of classical education is too narrow; others say it’s too expansive.

While there is no single definition of classical education, the CLT celebrates canonical works from Western civilization, with an emphasis on Greek, Roman and early Christian thought. Memorization, logic and debate are considered important skills.

The test has three sections: verbal reasoning, grammar and writing, and quantitative reasoning (math). Its English sections, like the SAT and ACT, ask students to read dense passages, demonstrate their comprehension via multiple-choice questions and spot grammatical errors.

But in sample materials, there is more religious thought, with passages from Thomas Aquinas; Jonathan Edwards, the Great Awakening preacher; and Teresa of Ávila, a 16th-century saint.

 

"We need a more vibrant marketplace" in college admissions testing, bleats the AEI think tank toad, but Florida doesn't want a vibrant marketplace of ideas, it wants the CLT to be the only game in town for Florida universities period, and it wants to banish the textbooks and knowledge and ideas that might stand in opposition to what the CLT tests for.

And pretty soon in Florida it will be the only game in town.