Guest
Jeremy Tate is the co-founder and CEO of the Classic Learning Test, which exists to reconnect knowledge and virtue by providing meaningful assessments and connections to seekers of truth, goodness, and beauty.
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Transcript
Eric Sammons:
Virtually all institutions today have been co-opted and used to push anti-Catholic and even anti-human ideologies. How can we take them back? One way is to start with education. That’s what we’re going to talk about today on Crisis Point. I’m Eric Sammons, your host, Editor-in-Chief for Crisis Magazine. Before we get started, I just want to encourage people to smash that like button, to subscribe to the channel, follow us on social media @CrisisMag. Also, you can go to crisismagazine.com, subscribe to our email newsletter. And this month, we only do this twice a year, we are doing our fundraising, our twice a year fundraising. And so this month, we’re doing that. So if you go to crisismagazine.com, you’ll probably be asked to give us some money and so we would appreciate that.
Okay, so let’s go ahead and get started. We have Jeremy Tate with us here today. He is the Co-Founder and the CEO of Classic Learning Test, which exists to reconnect knowledge and virtue by providing meaningful assessments and connections to seekers of truth, goodness, and beauty. Which you can tell I got that second part directly from your website, but we’ll talk a little bit more detail about what it is. Welcome to the program, Jeremy.
Jeremy Tate:
Hey, Eric Sammons. Thanks so much for having me.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, so we’re going to be talking about classical education. And I think you hear this term all the time in the Catholic world, and I think it’d be good to just define what do you mean by classical education? And how does it contrast with the education that you find in basically every public school and probably a lot of Catholic schools as well?
Jeremy Tate:
Yeah, it’s such a great question, and I love having this conversation. I think the first place to start, Eric, is with the telos or the goal. What’s the point of education? I started my teaching career in inner city New York. I think if you go back there to the school, I was at Progress High School, and say, “What are we doing here?” to any of the administrators, it would be something along the lines of, “Getting students to graduate.” Maybe as high as, “Giving students a chance at college.” If you go to almost any public school, and a lot of Catholic schools in the country, and you ask the students, “Why are we here? What’s the point of school?” The vast majority, they’re going to tell you something about to get a better job. And that is a very, very impoverished view of what we’re doing in this grand project that we call education. Something Americans funnel hundreds of billions of dollars to collectively.
If you go to a Catholic school, like Sacred Heart Academy; or a place like St. Jerome’s in Hyattsville, Maryland; or Our Lady of Lourdes in Denver, I think you’re going to hear the administrators and the teachers and the students respond very differently. They may respond with things like, “The point is to grow in wisdom, to grow in a love for the Lord Jesus Christ, to grow in a love for Christ and church.” It is a different telos that begins. And this was the ancient view of education that goes all the way back before the birth of Christ. I used to ask students, Eric, in my public school setting, “What’s the purpose of education?” They would say, “To get a better job.”
And then I would write this quote, it’s not a direct quote, but it’s a synthesis from Plato’s Republic. “The object of education is to learn to love what is beautiful.” They’d be like, “What is that?” They had no category for this. “Who’s Plato, anyway?” And this is something that Catholics very much agree with the ancients. We, of course, have made it clear that it’s ultimately cultivating a love for Christ and church, but that education is formation. And you think about, for generations and generations, they didn’t even call it education. They would say a young man or woman is being sent off to formation, especially if someone was going to enter the seminary to become a Catholic priest. This vision of education is formation has been wholly lost in the public school arena. And it has been nearly lost in many, many, many Catholic schools. But there is now a revival, a renaissance. You can call it classical education. A lot of great Catholic educators don’t like that term. They prefer to say, “Education from the heart of the church.” And I think the language, in both cases, is great.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, it’s interesting. My dad was actually a public school teacher, then principal administrator, and superintendent finally in 30-some years. And so it was awkward when we started having kids and we didn’t want them in the public schools. But the idea of public schools, this idea of get a job, and I would even argue it’s somewhat of a conditioning of kids to be good citizens. And I don’t mean that necessarily in a good way. I mean that more in a compliant citizens, probably that’s a better way to put it, compliant citizens. And that seems to be very common in how education is done. Because you see it’s going… Because a lot of the stuff they’re teaching in the schools today isn’t even about getting a good job. It’s about right think, the ideology, going on with the ideology. How did this all happen? If the classical idea, if the ancient idea, the medieval idea was education was this, what happened to get it all off course where, basically, now it seems to be more about indoctrination? Or, at best, just how to find the most high-paying job.
Jeremy Tate:
Sure. I think there’s a misperception that education just gradually drifted in the wrong direction, beginning in the 20th century. It was actually very coordinated and very intentional. There’s a book that came out about a year ago, the Battle for the American Mind. This is one of my dear friends, David Goodwin. He’s the President of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, our Protestant brothers there. He co-authored this with Pete Hegseth over at Fox News. But it really chronicles the history of education in America, and especially what happened when education became compulsory. And there very much was… And I think early fringe progressives 100 years ago understood that you don’t have to take control of every American institution to essentially own the culture. You just need to take control of education. If you control education, you’re going to eventually influence and control everything else.
And so the way we see it, Eric, there are four main levers that education at the high level is controlled by. And so one of these is accreditation. If a school has to jump through hoops that are disconnected from its mission, Catholic schools, that they have to jump through hoops to keep their accreditation, that’s going to mean mission drift. I’ve talked to Catholic superintendents who say, “The days are numbered where a Catholic school can be both accredited and authentically Catholic.” Because none of these accrediting agencies are Catholic. We’re deferring to define legitimacy to these secular organizations.
Another one is the control of public funds. We funnel 95% of all tax dollars into one very new vision, philosophy of education, modern, secular, progressive education, and instead of Catholic or classical education.
Eric, here, we believe another of these levers, of course, is standardized testing. I think the really crass way to put it is that whoever controls testing, in many ways, controls education. The test tends to drive or dictate the curriculum, at least to some degree. And I’m not saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it does seem to be a reality that the test does drive the curriculum.
The last one is teacher certification. And so if a student, a young person, a college student, has to go to the state ed school in order to teach and get a license, and they have to ingest a bunch of bad ideas for four years in order to get that license, that’s going to have a profound impact. And we’ve been in that situation, even at many Catholic schools. A lot of Catholic schools say, “You’ve got to have your state certification to teach here.” But a lot of the new Catholic schools, Eric, or a lot of the ones that have re-embraced the tradition of the church, sometimes, they view that certification as a liability. They understand that if a student has gotten the certification, they may have been formed in all the wrong ways. So they’re hiring directly from Thomas Aquinas College, directly from Christendom, directly from Hillsdale. And I think, often, they’re getting better teachers doing it that way.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, so I want to talk about the testing and whatnot in a minute. But we both made a comment, a somewhat derogatory comment, about just education to get a job. But on the other hand, obviously, people need to make a living. Particularly, I’m thinking of a father of a family, needs to have some type of skills that he can raise his family. Whether it be a plumber, a computer programmer, lawyer, whatever the case may be. And so what is the distinction then between education as you’re talking about, and for lack of a better term, skills training, I guess, in order to have a livelihood?
And is there a progression you see as ideal? Okay, you do the classical education early on, but then, at some age, you start now doing skill training or something like that. How does that all come together? Because I think that’s a big debate it’s like, “Okay, I’m going to college because I can get better paying job than if I don’t go to college. I can support my family better.” It doesn’t even have to be greedy. Just might be, “Hey, I can support my family better if I go to college.” So is there a point in which a school, whether it be a high school, university, should do skills training, rather than more a classical education?
Jeremy Tate:
It’s such a great question. I’m sitting here in downtown Annapolis, just about two blocks from St. John’s College. St. John’s College, it’s not a Catholic or Christian school, but it is a classical college. It is great books only. There are no majors. And when parents tour the school and students, they say, “Okay, this seems interesting. A deep dive into the Western intellectual tradition, that sounds interesting. What is my kid going to do with this?” And as an employer, we’re over here saying, “You can’t send us enough of these young people. They’ve learned how to actually think. They’ve learned how to write well, and speak well, listen well.” And these are rare, rare traits or virtues that are increasingly hard to find.
And I think it’s been about a fourth of our graduates are from Hillsdale College. This is a school that is not doing the pragmatic, practical thing. And so, in a job market like ours, where it’s rapidly changing, and the changing continues to accelerate, the ability to think about markets, to anticipate where industry’s going, a disproportionately high number of entrepreneurs have had some kind of a classical education to be able to be both in the weeds and take the 10,000-foot perspective as well. These are the fruits of a well-trained mind, that a classical education is becoming far more, I think, not less, valuable in terms of navigating this.
Think about the birth of the industrial factory school. This is, again, right after the Civil War, the origins of this in Massachusetts. Really borrowing from the industrial revolution. And trying to make, basically, economically efficient economies of scale to mass educate, in order for graduates to then be able to go essentially work in the factory. We’re in a very different job market right now. A lot of young people are piecing together three or four different jobs. A lot of people do freelance work. And so it takes more thought, I think, maybe than ever before to have a really, really successful career and to navigate this rapidly changing market. And I think these students are especially equipped to do that well.
Eric Sammons:
I remember, this is probably 20 years ago probably, I was working for an internet startup company and I was in charge. One of the things I did was I was in charge of customer service to answer questions when people had problems with their… It was a hosting company. But I remember I was hiring people who were in college as well as graduates. And one of the biggest frustrations to me is they couldn’t communicate with the customers. They were technically adept. But the problem is the customer, for example, would write in, and they would say, “Oh, I can’t do this.” And the customer wouldn’t always necessarily know what the real problem was, obviously, because they have a problem. And I would get frustrated because the texts would not… Their writing skills were just very poor, just to the point where sometimes I would even see where they would respond and it’d be the opposite of what they actually meant to say almost.
And that was something to your point of they might have the tech skills that if they knew what the problem was, they could actually go into the computer and they could fix it. But they couldn’t actually problem solve and determine like, “Okay, what does this person really need?” And then communicate with them that. So that was a light bulb for me of the need for more than just having these tech skills.
Now, that all being said, there are some… How would you argue then, for example… There’s some jobs where you just need plumbing, being a plumber, or an electrician. And some computer stuff, like a lawyer. How would you then say for somebody like that, what is the value of classical education? And at what point do they then move on to, “Okay, I have to actually get some specific skills for these jobs?”
Jeremy Tate:
Yeah, there’s a couple of new newish colleges I’m so excited about. So one of these is the College of St. Joseph the Worker, where I think they’ve identified exactly what you’re talking about. And not only do we have a crisis… And I think we’ve all experienced this during COVID especially, the fridge breaks, and we all realize, “Wow, there’s not many people who know how to fix this.” And what often happens as well is that to have a plumber come in, to have a skilled tradesperson come in, who can also be great with the customer, who can be empathetic, and have these personal skills as well. This is what the College of St. Joseph the Worker has identified. So they’re marrying a serious Catholic great books education with HVAC and welding and plumbing. Harmel Academy is doing the same thing in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. I’ll be out there at the end of January. But the same concept.
And we’ve been a part, at CLT, of a number of new colleges trying to launch. It’s really hard to launch a college right now in a contracting market. Less kids are going to four-year brick and mortar colleges than they were 10 years ago. But this particular vision of marrying the hard trades and dignifying the work of the hands, but doing it in a way that is also combined with serious Catholic formation, I think this is the very best of both worlds. I think that young people graduating from Harmel Academy or the College of St. Joseph the Worker, not only are they going to be great plumbers and tradesmen, but I think they’re going to go on to launch great plumbing companies as well. And to be leaders in these very, very important industries.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. So what then would you say is the ideal? Because high school, obviously, and before, you have classical education, then you have college level, university level, classical education is… Excuse my ignorance here, but would the university level just be more intense than the high school level? If you’ve gone to a classical high school education or, let’s say, you’re homeschooled in a curriculum very much the classics based. What then is the purpose of then going off to a college that would also be classically based at that point? Or is there, should they maybe go some other route?
Jeremy Tate:
We know the ages of 18 to 22 are uniquely formative for a young person. So a lot of kids, they will say to Mom and Dad or to the college counselor, “I’ve done 12 years at this classical Catholic school, I want something a little different.” I think many of these students, my daughter being one, she’s graduating in May from an all-girls Catholic school, Mount de Sales Academy, we felt like she was in a good place to go off to a public university. She’s an athlete. She’s going to be running in college. I think every student’s going to be a little bit different in terms of where they’re at in terms of their maturity. Some are going to be followers, some are going to be leaders. But it’s a really great question.
And we’re living through right now, Eric, a seismic shift. And in some ways a collapse of education as we’ve known it. It was only five or six years ago, a Harvard professor said that he thought within a 10-year period, 50% of American four-year brick and mortar colleges are going to close. And we have seen a number close already. I don’t know, I believe Chris Austin was the professor. I don’t think it’s going to be quite that high, but I think it could be 25% or 30% of colleges that close. And the reason is because we’ve got online. And as long as you have a vision for education of its only credentialing, it’s only acquiring knowledge, there’s no reason an online program can’t take the place. But if education is formation, a young person goes out to Wyoming Catholic, they come back different. They’re a different kind of person when they graduate. And that’s why I’m really, really excited about the future of a lot of Newman Guide type colleges, a lot of the faithfully Catholic colleges.
But it’s also not for everyone. And I think that we have bought into a very silly idea that college is for everyone. It wasn’t for everyone 50 years ago, it shouldn’t be for everyone now. And I think a lot of people are starting to wake up to that reality.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, I want to explore that for just a minute because I have had four of my children go off to four-year colleges over the past eight years. So I know that world, at least what’s involved with it. And I just think that it seems like… And they all went to Franciscan University, University of Dallas, so good schools. But just looking at the whole arena when we were exploring public universities and Catholic universities and whatnot, or not going to university and maybe getting a trade, something like that, it just seems like it’s a house of cards that has to fall apart. Because the costs are just so ridiculously high now. And like you said, ultimately, if all… Most these schools proved it during COVID that they didn’t even need to have all this stuff. You didn’t need to have the bricks and the mortar. Because they literally said, “Well, we’re going to charge you the exact same amount, but now you just do it from your house.”
Well, what’s the point of paying for everything else then if it’s just… A lot of it, which is left unsaid, is simply for the college experience was translated into party with your friends for four years without the parents around. And so it just seems like the whole thing is going to collapse. So is your prediction probably within 10 years, we’ll see a massive number of schools that are closing? And will costs go down? And what are the schools that are probably the most vulnerable to collapse?
Jeremy Tate:
Yeah, it’s a great question. There’s always a lag between new disruptive technologies and totally displacing. So when the car is invented, it’s not like every horse and buggy are out of a job the next day. But it happens within a decade or two. And we’re seeing just now, in some ways, the university system having to wrestle with the fact that it no longer owns access to knowledge. That was the value prop. The Harvard Library was the library. And, now, you’ve got more on your smartphone than the Harvard Library could ever dream of. So then what is Harvard offering? And, essentially, in the case of Harvard, they’re offering networking, credentialing, a brand to connect your name to. But in terms of the actual, there is this lag between the degree that is supposed to be, which is essentially a signal, and how that gets re-digested and people rethink it.
And so a degree from a place like Harvard, I don’t think it means what it used to mean. And at the same time, I think a degree from a place like the University of Dallas, where employers are figuring this out. Employers are competitive. I will, if I know nothing else, and I have to choose between a UD graduate and a Harvard graduate, I’m going UD every single time. Because I know the way that they’ve actually been formed. And they haven’t just been formed to be well read, they’ve been formed to be virtuous. In a world right now, where people can work from home and phone it in, and get by doing that, and jump from one job to another, the greatest need for almost every employer is virtuous employees. Who are going to do right by their employer, who are going to do the right thing when nobody’s looking. And these schools are doing that. They’re forming young people. I think it’s been a lot of the secret sauce for why CLT has been able to do what we’ve been able to do is specifically hiring young people from these kinds of colleges.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, I’m going to get to CLT here in a minute, but just every time you say something, I think of something else. I’m like, “Okay, I got to ask this.” I’m going to put you on the spot here a little bit. I know there’s the Newman Guide, of course, for good Catholic colleges. And I think most of us Catholic parents who are listening say, “We’ve consulted that, and it’s been just a godsend.” But do you have, yourself, certain Catholic colleges that you think are the cream of the crop? Really ones that you… Like you just said, if you got a UD versus a Harvard person, you would go with the University of Dallas person. Are there certain schools where you’re like, if you see that on their resume that you’re like, “That’s somebody that I know is going to be a solid worker,” and all the things you’ve said?
Jeremy Tate:
Yeah, I love all the Newman Guide schools. It’d be super hard for us to pick one over another. There’s some great colleges as well that are not Newman Guide. I think of a place like the Catholic Studies Center at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. It’s a small enclave in a very large Catholic university that is just gold. And so there are some solidly Catholic options, even outside the Newman Guide.
One of them that’s very special to me is Thomas Aquinas College. I had a chance to go out and visit about a year ago. And you’ve got 15 students. They’re well dressed. They’re wearing blazers and ties. They’re sitting around a big round table, no devices to be seen, talking at a deep level about the kinds of attacks that have shaped human history. I think a TAC grad, a UD grad, you talk to them for five minutes, and every time it’s like, “You’re a uniquely educated person.” You just get that there’s a humility, there’s an intellectual humility, there’s a curiosity as well. And an ability to get to the bottom of things as well, which is, again, increasingly hard to come by.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, how about, speaking of the non-Catholic option, it wouldn’t be a Newman Guide because it’s not Catholic, Hillsdale? The guy who brought me into the church, actually, 30 years ago, he’s a professor there. And we have had a number of people at our parish who are actually converts to Catholicism. They went to Hillsdale as a Protestant and became Catholic, even though the school is not itself Catholic. Do you have experience with Hillsdale and what it produces?
Jeremy Tate:
Yeah. Hillsdale is one of our closest partner colleges. And, in fact, about a fourth of all CLT employees are Hillsdale college graduates. So we love to hire. They were one of the early adopters, 2016/17, more than any other college, put us through the wringer. I remember the phone call with Doug Banbury, who’s the VP of partnerships, and he said, “We love the concept, Jeremy, but we’re not going to put the Hillsdale name behind it unless it’s up to snuff.” And formed two separate committees to really, really investigate what we were up to. But, really, they have helped… The impact of Hillsdale goes far, far, far beyond Hillsdale, Michigan. And I think they have allowed Americans to reimagine what a college can look like.
In fact, one of their taglines is, “What college ought to be.” And the first time I saw that, I’m like, “That is arrogant right there.” And the more I’ve gotten to know Hillsdale, I’m like, “Yeah, no, it’s basically just accurate.” And it really, really is. And, look, they’re down to a 17% acceptance rate. And yeah, no questions asked. Same thing I said about UD, I would say about Hillsdale. If we see a Hillsdale applicant coming in, we take that very, very seriously. And we’ve never been disappointed. We’ve never been disappointed. Our whole marketing team, there is four of them, all Hillsdale graduates. And it’s a real gift. I think America owes a debt of gratitude to Hillsdale College.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, I’ve only heard good things. I’m actually going up next year to Michigan. I’m making a trip. I’m going to try and make a trip over there. Because I’ve actually never been there, even though, like I said, my friend’s a professor there. So let’s talk a little bit now about CLT itself. And so why don’t you just explain why did you start it up? And what is it? Because some people might have no idea actually what the Classic Learning Test is.
Jeremy Tate:
Sure, yeah. And it’s interesting, Eric, because I think folks can initially be a bit skeptical. Like, “Oh, standardized testing, that’s not classical. Isn’t that where everything went wrong with education?” I think it requires starting with, what is the College Board? The College Board is the most powerful organization in American education. They have tentacles in every school in America almost, not everyone, but 95%. They control AP curriculum, AP testing, ACCUPLACER, PSAT, SAT. And in fact, the CEO of the College Board, David Coleman, I heard him speak, and he put it this way. He said that, “It is a statement of reality, though not a pretty one, that teachers will teach towards the test. And that there’s no force on earth strong enough to prevent that.” That’s the CEO of the College Board saying that this is a reality. Teachers will teach towards the test.
Okay, so then what do they put on the SAT and the PSAT if teachers teach towards the test? Well, two years ago, it was Bernie Sanders, they put on the SAT. They put a bunch of left-wing, progressive texts. They completely ignore and censor the entire Catholic Christian intellectual tradition like it just doesn’t exist. They pretty much ignore the entire Western intellectual tradition as well, in favor of multicultural texts and that kind of thing. So if you imagine, just as a thought experiment, what would American education be like if every teacher and student and parent knew that on the SAT you’re likely to encounter St. Augustine, or Thomas Aquinas, or Aristotle, maybe something from Plato’s Republic? It would have a profound, profound impact on American education. So, again, as I said when we hopped on here, I think a really crass way that I heard somebody put it a few years ago was that whoever owns testing ends up controlling and owning education, or having a big influence on it as well.
And so what we’re doing at CLT is trying to challenge the College Board by offering an alternative that colleges can still use. Colleges can equate an SAT and a CLT score to essentially mean something similar in terms of the level of academic ability a student has. But students who are well read, they’re comfortable reading Dante, they’re comfortable reading Boethius, they’re going to be able to do better on the Classic Learning Test than students who have never been exposed to these kinds of texts. And so the hopes here are very big. And, ultimately, we hope that in 10 years, and I think to some degree this is happening already, even the parent who’s just a pure pragmatist, they just want their kid to get into the best college, and that’s all they’re thinking about. If we can make the CLT a gold standard in American education, the parent’s going to say, “You know what? If we want them to do well in that, we need to get them into a classical school, a classical Christian school, a serious Catholic school.”
We are so quick to forget. We’re so quick to forget as a people, as Catholics, we created universities. The modern university system was born out of medieval Christendom. We created so many of the first schools in America. Catholics were the standard for academic excellence. And I believe that the College Board occupies the exact spot in American education that the Catholic Church ought to occupy. And, unfortunately, that’s not the case. And so what we’re doing is trying to fill in the gap. And offer an alternative that certainly leans into the Catholic intellectual tradition and rewards students for being familiar with it.
Eric Sammons:
So if I remember from my days taking SAT, many, many years ago… And my kids took it, and I didn’t pay attention that much. My wife was in charge of most of that. But I remember the SAT, you have your reading, writing, and then I think you have a math section. So how does the CLT fundamentally… What are an example of how the questions would be different? I would assume on the math section… Do you guys have a math section? And if you do, is it any different? But more on the writing and thinking, how does the CLT really bring out somebody who’s classically educated would do better? What’s an example of how that would happen?
Jeremy Tate:
Sure. I’d love to give you maybe three or four quick examples. So one of the things that the CLT did is we retained elements of aptitude testing. Aptitude testing, it’s not achievement testing. Achievement testing measures mastery of a particular body of content. Aptitude testing is trying to get at a well-trained mind, cognitive ability. One of the hallmarks of aptitude testing are analogies. When I took the SAT in the late ’90s, early… I graduated in 2000. The SAT was full of analogies. There is not one analogy on the SAT anymore, not one.
Eric Sammons:
Really? I didn’t know they dropped that.
Jeremy Tate:
Yeah. Yeah, they completely got rid of them because they went in the direction of achievement testing. The SAT now and the ACT, they’re both common core achievement tests is what both of them are.
Another way that CLT is doing this is, again, through source material. And so whereas the College Board, maybe you’re reading a passage about… I’ll just tell you a few of the actual ones. The processing of Greek yogurt, penguins in Antarctica, the Bernie Sanders op-ed a couple of years ago. Well, what do you see on the CLT? You may see a reading passage from, again, maybe Aristotle’s politics. Maybe in the modern age, something from Flannery O’Connor, or maybe C. S. Lewis. We even have Dante. We even have Charles Darwin. Nietzsche on there. We have philosophy. And so this allows students that have had this kind of education to showcase this.
It’s been really interesting from a data perspective. Our public school students, they don’t do very well on the philosophy religion part of the CLT. They’ve often never been exposed to these kinds of texts in their life. They may be going into the test and they’ve never even heard the word philosophy or theology. So we want to be able to do this.
On the math side, something very similar. And by the way, the CLT, structurally, is a very simple structure. It’s 40 verbal reasoning questions, 40 grammar writing questions, and then 40 math or quantitative reasoning questions as well. And on the math side, we also retain elements of aptitude testing, logic questions. Logic questions that don’t fall into an algebra 1, 2, geometry, or trig box. Questions that the SAT, again, has gotten away from completely with the new Common Core Aligned SAT, which also has all of the weird Common Core math now built into it. The CLT math, it looks a lot more like SAT math from the 1980s or ’90s, when they were really trying to get at a student’s ability to reason well, to use logic to come to an answer. So those are just some of the high level ways I think that we’re quite a bit different.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, so it sounds like the SAT is a lot different today than it was when I took it, because I took it in the late ’80s. And I think that logic and reasoning, that’s what I was talking about when I was talking about the struggles I had with a lot of people who were in customer service for this tech company I was helping run. Because, yeah, they might know the math, they might know the programming language, whatever. But they couldn’t say, “Okay, you have this problem. What are the steps to go about to solve it?” Just logically, “Okay, try this first. If it’s not that, then do this.” And you had to think some on that because it wasn’t always the same. And so just the idea of, “Okay, I’ve eliminated these possibilities, so it has to be one of these possibilities,” I didn’t always see that with people, with a lot of the workers. And so I wonder how much that is because just, like you said, not being taught anymore.
Now, the SAT and the ACT, I remember I took both back when I was doing it, and I think my kids might have taken both. Maybe they didn’t take the ACT anymore. I can’t remember now. But they are the dominant. They have been for a very long time. They’re the dominant test that colleges use for forever. How did you then jump in, I guess it was 2015, I think you said you got started, how did you then start to make inroads to… It’s like a small software company saying, “I’m going to take on Apple,” or something like that. How do you actually start taking on these behemoths?
Jeremy Tate:
Yeah, the CLT story, I’ll just tell you a bit about this. It’s a funny story what actually happened. And so I was running an SAT, ACT prep company. I was working in Mount de Sales Academy, a school run by the Nashville Dominicans. And the new SAT was announced, and everybody knew this was a Common Core Alignment. In fact, SAT, the College Board hired the chief architect of the Common Core Standards, David Coleman, to come and be the CEO and align the SAT with the Common Core in order to win big state contracts. And so I was running an SAT, ACT prep company. And I heard people saying, “We didn’t sign up for this. We didn’t sign onto this. Where’s our test?”
So my idea was I would create a prep course for the new tests. Because, of course, there was going to be a new test. Everybody’s upset about this alignment with Common Core. And so I was researching who’s making the new test? Where do you find that? And I realized, “Huh, nobody’s making the new test.” And so I thought, “Well, this is wild.” I wasn’t the only one saying, “Where’s the new test?” And because I was doing multiple things at the same time, working as a college counselor, running an SAT, ACT prep company, it was easy to have early conversations with folks at places like Christendom. And say, “Hey, how hard would it be to add an alternative? If there was an alternative to the SAT and ACT that better reflected a Christendom education, how hard would it be to add that as an option?” And right away they said, “We would actually love that. Nothing like that exists.”
And so there was a proof of concept, just from early conversations, and early on connecting with folks at the Newman Guide. And they connected me to folks over at The Institute for Catholic Liberal Education, ICLE. And we started to imagine working with folks like Michael Van Hecke, what could this look like? We took from Thomas Aquinas College and St. John’s in Annapolis an initial author bank, or a framework for, well, what is this tradition? We’ve fine-tuned it a lot since then. And yeah, it’s just been a matter of the more colleges that adopt… The first college to adopt was Magdalen. Unfortunately, Magdalen is shutting its doors, as you may know. But we’re at about 250 colleges. And with every college it adopts, it’s a lot easier to get new students.
And the other thing we’re trying to do, Eric, is combine this with really, really trying to be what I would describe as a Chick-fil-A of standardized testing. Where if you go to Chick-fil-A, you can think, “Man, I’m going to be here for two hours. The line’s forever. It’s a mile long.” And then, 90 seconds later, you’ve got your shake and your nuggets and the right sauce, and the person says, “My pleasure.” And you’re like, “Man, this place is amazing.” We want to offer the same high level of customer service. We exist to serve schools. We exist to serve students. We exist to serve parents. And that attitude of service has really been lost at the College Board and at ACT.
I remember as a college counselor, I’d have to call the College Board a lot. And you’d get transferred five times. They’d be annoyed that you’re calling. And there is a need, a demand, for another option. And a lot of this story, I never thought I would experience God’s providence in a business arena. But it was like every time we needed something, the right person seemed to show up. And so it’s been an incredible adventure of… We think of ourselves as David versus Goliath and Goliath. But people love underdog stories, and we love telling the CLT story because, in many ways, it should never have worked. We had no investors. We had nothing, really, but an idea. And it’s been a process of locking arms with people who share this vision for education as human formation, as the cultivation of love for Christ and church, that we’ve been able to do this seemingly impossible thing. But it’s been a big, big, big effort. And a lot of people have been instrumental in it.
Eric Sammons:
I noticed that my kids, my older kids, they started going off to college, I think, 2016, something like that, so through the COVID years. And after COVID, well, during COVID, it seemed like some of these universities were starting to drop standardized testing requirements. And it seems that, in some cases, it’s lingering on. And have you found that… Are schools in general, maybe not even ones that take CLT, but just maybe SAT, are more and more schools starting to drop the standardized testing? And how does that impact you guys?
Jeremy Tate:
Yeah, it’s really hard to respond here in less than five minutes because there’s so much behind the test-optional movement. So the test-optional movement begins really about in college in the 1960s. It’s been around for a long time, and it grew over the years, groups like FairTest and others. But it’s become part of the conversation around diversity, equity, and inclusion. And when you think about a place like Harvard or Chapel Hill, a standardized testing is a measure of objective criteria. And when there’s a hyper focus on shaping a class around some of these issues involving race, if you have a standardized test, there’s then a liability that you’re not being fair. And so as these colleges have become more and more focused on shaping a class that they want to bring in for these various reasons, that’s a separate conversation, a standardized test has made it hard for them to do that. Now, it also creates other challenges by moving away from that as well. Colleges want to have a high retention rate. And not knowing where students are at on an objective criteria.
Now, on the flip side, I think you’ve had on the right, and this is the case with Florida, Florida is now a CLT state. The whole public university system in Florida utilizes CLT, Florida State University in Florida. More than half of our students are now in Florida. We’re working with a lot of even districts in Florida well. But I think in states where you’ve got red legislatures, where you’ve got more conservative board of governors, in these kinds of states, they want this objective, hard look at academic performance. That regardless of race or ethnicity, that students are going to be held to the same level of academic excellence for both graduation and college entrance.
So the future of test-optional, I don’t know. We saw MIT go back to requiring a test. Purdue went back. The University of Dallas just went back to requiring a test. I think that we’re going to see a little bit of a pendulum swing back towards testing, but I don’t think it’ll be like it was before, or at least for some time. But I think, increasingly, it is more conservative educators or education states that are really leaning into it still.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. I want to wrap it up here in a minute. I just want to ask, from a parent perspective… Because I think a lot of our listeners probably are parents, maybe younger kids and stuff like that. But what, as a parent, what would you recommend to parents looking on the education of their kids for both? And we haven’t really talked about homeschooling, obviously, and there’s homeschooling options that are classical and things like that. But for parents who are looking at schools for high school and for college that aren’t homeschool options, what would be the recommendation of the guidelines? Obviously, the Newman Guide and stuff like that, and then there’s certain high schools. But what should the parents be looking for when they’re looking for these schools for their kids?
Jeremy Tate:
Yeah, it’s incredible. I would say, one of the things, especially as Catholics, certainly access to the sacraments. I think it’s the best indication of how serious a Catholic school is, how are you connected to the sacramental life of the church? How often do your kids have access to confession? How often do you go to mass as an entire school? Is it every day? My kiddos go to Divine Mercy Academy, they have daily mass. Every day starts off with mass. A lot of Catholic schools, maybe once a month. There’s a lot of Catholic schools that have NFL level athletic complex, and they’ve got no chapel. They do chapel a couple of times a semester in the cafeteria or something. It’s a distant afterthought. So I think touring campus, getting a sense of how prioritized are the sacraments of the church, I think is the best way to do it.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. Well, yeah, that does sound to be the priority. What else can you tell us about how to find out more about CLT as a parent, as an educator? If somebody with a university is watching or anything like that, how can you find out more about it?
Jeremy Tate:
Yeah, thanks, Eric. Yeah, cltexam.com is our website. We offer assessments from third grade, all the way to the CLT senior year in high school. One note, a lot of people don’t use the CLT for college entrance. A lot of schools, a lot of high schools, they use the CLT more for internal insight into the academic progress of their students every year. And so if you’re a Catholic school, and you care how are kids doing in terms of their ability to read and understand great philosophy, great religious texts, classical literature, CLT is really the only standardized testing assessment they can get at that kind of data insight.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. Well, good. Because I want to make sure I link to the website in the description, in the show notes, so people can find it. I think it’s great. I know that the SAT… I don’t think we’d heard of CLT when my oldest went off to school. And having her take the SAT and ACT, my wife would just tell her, basically, “This is just a thing we have to do and we’re just going to game the system. It doesn’t mean… This is a stupid test, but we have to do it. And so I’m going to make it so you can do well in this test. But I haven’t educated you at all to do well in this test because this test is stupid.”
And so it was nice. And by the time our fourth kid was, there was this option, “Okay, just take this test and we’re going to see how well we did.” Because we homeschooled, how well we did teaching them. And I think that’s something that homeschoolers as well can get some benefit from is taking these tests as well to see, “Okay, how am I doing? How’s the program I’m using doing as well?”
Jeremy Tate:
Eric, I really want to stress before we get off, we don’t want to over… I graduated in 2000, and back then, it was almost like your SAT score was branded on your forehead. You’re a 1020 for life. You’re a 1020. And there was an overemphasis on what this score meant and how it impacted-
Eric Sammons:
I actually still know my score. I’m not going to say what it is. I know my score on my SAT and ACT. I know it to this day from more than 35 years ago. Just because, like you said, it’s branded into you, “This is your identity.” Sorry to interrupt, but it reminded me that’s-
Jeremy Tate:
Totally, yeah. And it’s not that, it’s not that big of a deal, but it’s also not no deal. And so what we want to say is, “Look, this is a helpful snapshot into where your son or daughter is at in some key academic areas at a given moment in time.” It’s not anything more than that. It doesn’t mean you failed as a parent. But you might see, “Wow, we’ve got some work to do in grammar writing. We’ve got some work to do in terms of geometry.” You’re going to be able to get that kind of insight. But it’s really important that parents sit down with their kiddos and process and have the conversation about scores. Because we don’t want students to make this the end all, be all. It’s far more important that students love learning, that they love books, than that they get a good CLT score.
Eric Sammons:
Right, great. Well, thank you. I really appreciate, Jeremy, you being on the program. Hopefully, people will check you guys out. And keep up the good work. It’s great to have an option against the Borg of the College Board, so I really appreciate it. So thanks for being on, Jeremy.
Jeremy Tate:
Eric, thanks so much for having me.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, until next time, everybody, God love you.