America’s founding principle of federalism became pretty much of a dead letter in mid-century America, what with the demands of being a superpower and the embarrassment of the chief example of states’ rights being Jim Crow. But lately we’ve seen states experimenting in quite different fashions.
For example, in 2021 during the Racial Reckoning, the University of California Regents took the lunatic step, against the explicit advice of a faculty senate commission of top social scientists, to not even make it optional for UC applicants to submit SAT or ACT test scores but to make it mandatory that nobody was allowed to mention their test scores.
In contrast, Florida is now adding a third admissions test beyond the cozy SAT/ACT duopoly. From the New York Times news section:
Florida Approves Classic Learning Test for Use in College Admissions
Students can take the exam in place of the SAT or ACT. It’s the latest push by Gov. Ron DeSantis to remake his state’s education system.
By Dana Goldstein
Sept. 8, 2023, 5:02 p.m. ETFlorida’s state university system approved on Friday the Classic Learning Test for use in undergraduate admissions, elevating the little-known exam as an alternative to the SAT and ACT.
The vote from the system’s board of governors is the latest push by Gov. Ron DeSantis to remake Florida’s education system, from the elementary school curriculum to college. The CLT is currently taken mostly by religious home-schoolers and private-school students.
The governing board approved the exam over the objections of its faculty representative, Amanda Phalin, a business professor at the University of Florida. She said she could not yet support use of the CLT, as it is known, because it lacked “empirical evidence that it is of the same quality as the SAT or ACT.”
The CLT tests similar skills to the SAT and ACT. But in the exam’s English section, there is less emphasis on contemporary fiction and memoir, and more on Christian thought and excerpts from the Western canon—C.S. Lewis, Saint Augustine, Erasmus.
The CLT started in 2015 as a for-profit company, and, up until now, mostly Christian colleges accepted its scores.
The exam has a thin research record, with little information available on how well the test performs in predicting college success, especially for more diverse groups of students from public schools and secular private schools. …
Mr. Tate said that his test was apolitical, despite the fact that it was mostly conservatives, like Governor DeSantis, who had sought to expand its use. He noted that the program’s academic advisers included Christopher Rufo, the right-wing firebrand who has helped lead the attack on critical race theory, and Cornel West, the progressive activist and professor who is currently running a third-party bid for president.
Cornel West is literate in a number of ancient languages.
… The CLT has operated on a tiny scale compared with the SAT or ACT. From 2016 to 2023, just 21,000 high school juniors and seniors took the exam; in the high school class of 2022, 1.7 million took the SAT and 1.3 million took the ACT. …
“This College Board, like, nobody elected them to anything,” Governor DeSantis has said. “They’re providing service—so you can either utilize those services or not.”
The ACT organization maintains an extremely low profile, which is prudent in the post–Bell Curve era in which Establishment America’s highest principle is that Charles Murray Is Wrong, but all the numbers say he is right. The College Board, which is responsible for the SAT, traditionally takes a higher profile in public, but it has been getting more secretive lately.
There’s a lot of unaccountable power in these organizations. Here’s an example involving the reading selections on the SAT/PSAT that I find pretty benign (I rather like the new selections), but it shows how much can be changed on tests for who knows what reasons with nobody noticing except test prep consultants in Seoul.
The head of the College Board is David Coleman. A former McKinsey consultant, Coleman got this job because he had earlier sold Bill Gates, the most important K-12 education philanthropist, on the ill-fated Common Core fad, and he used its brief period of popularity to become head of the College Board with the promise of aligning the SAT with Common Core.
Coleman and Gates were a good cultural fit for each other, which is why they got along so famously. As you may recall, in 1996, Gates handed his favorite magazine editor Michael Kinsley a lot of money to start up his dream webzine, Slate.com.
Coleman had been on a champion high-school debate team with future magazine writer Hanna Rosin, who married David Plotz, one of Kinsley’s many proteges, who became the third editor of Slate.
One of Coleman’s pet peeves about the SAT was that the reading comprehension selections were too girly: too many excerpts from novels about feelings, too many poems about feelings, etc. What the SAT needed was more lucid nonfiction prose about facts and logic, like, you know, in Slate in the 1990s.
For some reason, I took a practice SAT test a couple of years ago (after Coleman’s 2017 revamp of the SAT), and, to my surprise, found the reading selections quite interesting. For example, one was by one of Kinsley’s proteges at Slate, David Owen, that could have been a classic Old Slate centrist contrarian article: Owen argued that the way to fight freeway traffic jams is not by adding more lanes but by reducing the number of lanes.
The SAT reading selections were, to me, muy simpatico. They often reflected the kind of Kinsley-influenced opinion journalism I’ve consumed in vast quantities going back over 40 years.
But that’s also an example of unaccountable power. Why did the SAT change in the direction of more male nerd reading selections? Because that’s the kind of writing that David Coleman likes to read. Him and Bill Gates. And his friends Hanna Rosin and David Plotz. What more do you need to make a change that could impact the lives of millions of college students?
I don’t know anything about this new Classic test, but I like the idea of states sponsoring more competition in the stagnant world of testing.
