The College Board—the maker of the SAT—is amassing an army of lobbyists across the country for one purpose: not to improve student outcomes, increase college access, or even promote its own test.Â
No, the College Board is trying to defend its often state-sponsored testing monopoly from an upstart competitor a fraction of its size called the Classic Learning Test.
I know this well because I’m the president of CLT — and this is what’s happened. Back in 2015, I founded CLT as an alternative college entrance exam after I saw how the SAT (and what was then its only competitor, the ACT) were rooted in the controversial Common Core education standards. As an SAT and ACT tutor at the time, I wanted to give students the option to take something rigorous and rooted in the inspiring works of the Western Canon instead of being locked into a test replete with dry reading passages…
