Michael Torres from Classic Learning Test

Ed Tarnowski: Welcome back to the State of Choice podcast. I’m your host, Ed Tarnowski, also known as Ed with EdChoice. Joining me today is Michael Torres, who is the Director of Legislative Strategy at Classic Learning, or CLT.

Welcome to the show, Michael. Thank you so much for having me, I’m excited. Thank you for being on.

Just to begin here, would you mind starting us off by just first introducing yourself and telling us about the work of CLT?

Michael Torres: Certainly, so I do the policy and kind of lobbying work for the Classic Learning Test, which is a very big job, bigger than most people would presume. For an assessment company, it’s not something that a lot of folks in the education reform world work on very often, but I’ve been able to learn quite a bit about it over the last year. Prior to this, I worked for, I was in the Navy doing public affairs, and then I worked for Commonwealth Foundation in Pennsylvania, doing a lot of school choice work.

Education choice is very important to me. Had a great time working with the folks there, helping to build and grow school choice programs there. They have a couple of tax credit scholarship programs, and eventually I found my way here to help expand opportunities in college entrance exams, as well as lower grade exams.

We have third through eighth grade tests, the 10th grade tests, and a college admissions test. To give a little background on CLT, we were started 10 years ago, as of this month, October, by a former public school teacher and SAT test prep company owner. He started a company to prep mostly private school students in the Maryland area to do well on the SAT.

Back in 2014, the SAT and ACT were both rewritten to align with Common Core. The exams became very similar. Most of the private schools he was working with did not use Common Core or care to have their students tested by it, but they had no option.

So he started thinking, why doesn’t someone make a third option? Why are there only two? So he made a new one.

Most people kind of thought he was crazy when he tells the story. He had fully admits that he was told he shouldn’t do this many times. Well, people asked him if it is illegal, actually, to do such a thing because people tend to assume that the SAT or ACT are part of state government or something of that nature.

But he did it anyways, started with less than 100 students and two schools, accepting his new college entrance exam. And it grew steadily over the next several years. Used almost exclusively by private K through 12 students earning admissions to private liberal arts colleges.

That changed big time in 2023 when Governor DeSantis, as many people might remember, had a bit of a fight with the college board. And he asked his staff to find an alternative. Is there a way to bring competition to this arena of education in Florida?

And we just happened to be there. So we submitted a technical report, a concordance study, all the stuff that was needed for acceptance in Florida. They passed a law to include us in the school choice program as an accountability exam, the getting students into dual enrollment, graduating from them for high school, earning college scholarships, all of that.

And then the University of Florida system subsequently approved us for use in university admissions. So that really exploded things. We’ve been trying to see if other states and other parts of the country wanna do the same thing.

And that’s kind of a real quick gist of how we got from 2015 to here. Happy to go into further detail if you’d like.

Ed Tarnowski: Yeah, no, that’s really exciting. Thank you for that background. And just to kind of keep this going on before we move on to some of the more spicy topics, if you will.

So you told me and you explained that CLT was founded to be a centralized test in the Western tradition. Your founder, Jeremy Tate, was out there. He questioned why American education had become so utilitarian.

Could you tell us a little bit about what that means?

Michael Torres: Yes, certainly. So when the other two exams were rewritten, it was in a time when college, the concept of college, the concept of admissions was, the way I like to explain it, turning college into a white-collar job training program. And that’s what it was for.

Get you through, you serve your time, you get out and you make money. Education’s sort of secondary to that process. The purpose of it is money.

And the purpose of school is because you need that thing to put on your resume to go make that money. And the purpose of the test is to just be some check mark to show that you can go through those next couple steps. That seemed kind of soulless to Jeremy and to a lot of people in American education, including myself.

So the subject matter of his exam, the purpose behind it is to present students with what is most important in education beyond the more utilitarian aspects of, if you’re gonna get an accounting degree, what does it mean to be an educated person? So he aligned the test with the liberal arts tradition. That means the reading content of the exam, for the grammar writing and verbal reasoning sections come from classic works of literature, philosophy, science, everything from Aristotle to Frederick Douglass, Isaac Newton to Albert Einstein.

You’ll have Shakespeare, Immanuel Kant, Frederick Nietzsche, all those kinds of written works will be presented to students in their 11th grade year as they’re searching to get into college. And that is the basis of the questions they’ll be asked for reading comprehension, grammar, that sort of thing. In the math section, what that means is we don’t allow calculators.

We don’t wanna know whether a student is good at memorizing formulas and plunking them into a computer. We wanna know, can they do math? So they are presented with many more geometry and trigonometry based questions than the other exams.

We include logic and reasoning questions which measure aptitude to a higher degree than the other exams, as well as some complex arithmetic, number theory, set theory, things like that. And it’s very difficult, especially students can often be thrown by the fact that they’re not allowed to have that assistance of technology. So those are the big gist of how the exam is different.

That all being said, it is very similar to other exams in that it’s a test of reading, writing, and arithmetic at a college level that a school can use to determine admissions. So that’s kind of the big differences, but also how it’s the same.

Ed Tarnowski: You know, I have to say utilitarian is the perfect word to describe this. I mean, Robert Enloe, our president and CEO likes to talk about where the school bill came from. It came from when to move in factories.

So, and we’re just still doing this the same way just because this is the way it has been done. But I always say, there’s a famous phrase saying those are some of the most dangerous words in the English language, which I couldn’t agree with more. Me too, me too.

So there was a recent Wall Street Journal editorial really highlighting the work that you guys are doing and praising it saying, it’s good to see some competition for the SAT and ACT. So I’m now reading that CLT is accepted by more than 300 colleges. US service academies will be accepting it very soon.

Florida and Arkansas, as you mentioned in Florida, have opened up their public universities to the CLT, opened up to competition. Can you tell us a little bit about how that rollout has been and what maybe are the next headwinds?

Michael Torres: Certainly. So after Florida adopted CLT across the board, we quite honestly did not expect there to be much of an uptake. We don’t have the massive marketing budget of the college board.

They have $2 billion in the bank. I’ll just say we do not. We are not a well-known name in most of the country, especially among public school students and public school families.

We have big, big name recognition in homeschool, in a lot of private schools, but in public school, not so much. So we thought maybe 5,000, 10,000 students would take the exam in the first year. We were wrong.

Well over 100,000 students took the test in the first year. It was enormous. So we took that year to digest the number of Florida students we were getting and taking the exam, make sure our security systems worked properly, ensure our assessment production was at the proper level and that we could meet everything that the Florida State Government needed of us as perfectly as we could.

After that, I came aboard. They hired me to see if any other state would want to do at least part of what Florida did. And we ended up succeeding in some fashion, some different, some very similar to Florida in Arkansas, Louisiana, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Texas in the last legislative session.

And those all look different. For instance, in Arkansas, the Governor Sanders and Jacob Oliva, the superintendent, the secretary, I think he’s called of education in Arkansas, worked on two different pieces of legislation. One was the Arkansas Access Act, which among many, many other things that reformed higher education, mandated that the University of Arkansas system accept CLT to the same extent as they accept SAT and ACT, which put us at parity.

And then they also had a bill that allowed us to be an option for high school students. They have an opportunity to choose which exam they would like to take during high school. In Oklahoma and Wyoming, there was a bill and a regulatory change respectively that allowed CLT to qualify students for publicly funded scholarships.

And then in Texas, they have a massive, massive program that gets the top 10% of students into the University of Texas system. And it had an SAT and ACT score tied to it. We came in and said, first of all, the things you have written into law are incorrect.

They had an SAT score from like two or three versions of SAT written into law. The score literally didn’t exist anymore, but students were still using it somehow. So we argued to change that.

And this is the way we traditionally go in and speak to folks. If there’s interest from a state government or maybe heads of schools or partners of ours in the state introduce us to lawmakers. What I’ll say is you have SAT and ACT written into state law, like almost every single state in the country.

You’ve written them by name. You don’t see Lockheed Martin written into federal law when they pass the defense budget. It says, you should go get a jet or many jets.

And then they have the private companies compete or many compete alongside each other and produce multiple products that the government uses. That’s what Florida, or Texas accepted, excuse me. So they crossed out SAT and ACT out of that program and passed a law saying that the higher education coordinating board should pick the exams and scores to be used for that program.

And we’re now coordinating with them to provide all the data they need to get us approved. So we’re happy to be able to compete fairly. And that’s really the gist of it so far is we’re looking for the opportunity to fairly compete with the other tests.

Because when we’re given that opportunity, we know we can succeed. You asked about headwinds, and there’s quite a bit. Even though we’ve had these successes in a few states, there’s still a lot to do.

The biggest headwind is obviously name recognition. When people think of college admissions exams, they don’t think of CLT immediately yet. In some states they do because we’ve been working there for a year or two now, but in most states, not yet.

That’s a big hurdle. But probably a more difficult one to deal with, especially for my job, is the SAT and ACT’s massive lobbying budget. The SAT, the college board which runs the SAT has at least a million dollar a year lobbying budget, which means when I show up in Lincoln, Nebraska and say hello and wanna educate lawmakers on what is the CLT, immediately following me is a whole bunch of hired lobbyists from both of the exams telling them that they should not include us for various reasons.

So that’s a big, big hurdle. So yeah, there’s a lot to do there, but we found success despite those hurdles.

Ed Tarnowski: Yeah, no, that’s really great to hear. And at Heritage Choice, of course, we are a test agnostic. However, I would love for you to expand a little bit more on why it’s so problematic that states are not only allowing often one of these tests, but literally writing it into statute, that only this specific test.

Let’s talk about why that’s problematic, why that’s an issue for competition.

Michael Torres: Certainly, well, I always think back to my time working at Commonwealth Foundation in Pennsylvania and how difficult of a time we had doing any reform to education because of the monopoly that teachers unions had over the entire labor force of education and the political force that enabled them to have in the Capitol. Very similar situation with the College Board or the ACT oftentimes. They’re written into law, sometimes just one, sometimes both.

It makes it so that states think of themselves as an SAT or ACT state, which is kind of odd. You don’t usually find states aligning themselves with a private company in that sort of way. So it causes those sort of hurdles.

So when we come in to introduce ourselves, I’ll encounter a lawmaker who I think should be very friendly, loves competition, very free market. And then they’ll say, well, we’re an SAT state. And I’ll say, no, you’re not, you don’t have to be.

You can allow competition in this realm as well. You don’t have to have a government and mandated preference for a private company. As long as the organizations you’re allowing to compete can prove themselves to be a valid, reliable, high quality exam, which we’ve done over and over again, then this should be a free market as well.

So that’s a big, big reason for it. Another reason for it, and this gets to one of the fundamental reasons why CLT exists is because what’s on an exam, especially a high stakes exam, like a college admissions exam, which are often used in public schools and in private schools for things like graduation and scholarships and other very important metrics, is that what’s on that exam is often taught in class, directs the curriculum to a certain extent. And we wrote an article for AEI.

They invited us to write a little bit about it. And basically what we explained was that there’s been ample amount of studies of how testing affects curriculum. And one study in particular was actually a synthesis of 49 studies that found that educators and administrators will change curriculum in response to high stakes testing.

And while that was mostly focused on the state mandated exams that are mandated through the Every Student Succeeds Act at the federal level, that logic definitely extends to other exams, especially college entrance exams. So if you want your curriculum to be guided by the college board, then write in a monopoly status for the college board. If you would like to minimize the extent to which your public and private schools curriculum is guided by private companies like that, then allow competition.

Because then you don’t know which test the student’s going to choose. So your logical next step is just educate the child well so that they can go take any exam and do well. That I think is a much better option than teaching to any one particular exam.

Ed Tarnowski: Really underscores the importance of competition. It really seems that there’s a lot of centralization here around not necessarily in this example with the federal government, but centralization around one company with such an oversized impact over curriculum. And yeah, we want to see more competition there for sure.

And this brings me to a question that I have for you on, because what you guys are advocating for is not for CLT to be put in statute the way that SAT or ACT has. You’re simply advocating for the allowance of alternatives or other competition. So I’m really curious, could you tell me a little bit about the legislative landscape?

How has been the, what has the response been in states when you’re working with legislators? Is it bipartisan? Is it across lines?

And what kind of questions are they asking?

Michael Torres: That’s a great question. And it has been different in every place that we have been invited to. So in places like Louisiana, it was unanimous or nearly unanimous to include the classic learning test as a mechanism for students to get what’s called the TOSS scholarship.

It’s a very big publicly funded scholarship program that a huge number of students used to go to LSU, University of Louisiana. And we were working on a bill with several members of the legislature there. Several of our K through 12 partner schools in the state had advocated for and told their local lawmakers, hey, we’d love for our students who are taking the lower grade CLT to take the college entrance CLT and be able to get TOSS.

And we got no pushback. I spoke to Democrat lawmakers there. I spoke to Republican lawmakers there.

The superintendent, the governor’s office, everyone was like, certainly, why wouldn’t we have competition? Why haven’t we heard of this? In other places like Nebraska, for instance, I mentioned that earlier, went and Senator Mermin, who’s the chairman of the education committee, his grandchildren had taken the CLT, their homeschool.

Hearing about it from homeschoolers across Nebraska. We have been growing significantly in the homeschool community since COVID, since a lot of parents who really want accountability for their child and were used to that in the private or public schools that they were in but left during COVID, they found us as an opportunity to do that. But when we came up on the floor, conservative and liberal lawmakers alike were very, very uninterested in allowing competition because the ACT lobbyist there was extremely powerful and very friendly with the lawmakers who had a lot of sway in that debate.

And the questions we get from people kind of vary. It depends on what the college board and ACT lobbyists are arguing behind the scenes. One common one is test security, which is very ironic because we’ve never had a very big or any security problem or cheating scandal, whereas the SAT had that famous one with the actress, I forget her name, where students and parents were bribing the test administrators or proctors to be able to let them cheat.

The ACT had another big one where their Chinese operations, they have a very big operation in China to help students from there get into US colleges. They were getting forms of the exam. They’re just getting them, I don’t know how exactly, and getting reports.

Ed Tarnowski: I haven’t heard about this.

Michael Torres: I need to do more reading. Yeah, the Reuters ended up having a very big profile on the problem. And despite that, they were arguing that we are an insecure exam when we use something called lockdown browser, similar program that most universities use.

And this is for our remotely proctored exam. We have exams in two mechanisms. One is in school.

One is remotely proctored. Just like this, you see the student’s face. We have them see the whole room.

Every click keyboard is recorded. Their screen is recorded. Their computer is locked down through our program.

They can’t access anything else. It’s reviewed by three people afterwards, including the data. And we have a machine learning program compare their data to every other student’s scores we tested and how they performed on the exam.

Pretty dang secure. We’ve had no problems with it, but that’s a really common issue. Other ones have to do more fundamentally with the validity of the exam.

It’s how reliable it is in providing good scores for college entrants and that sort of thing, which we’re very capable of combating. We’ve had independent psychometricians with PhDs in this create a technical report, where it tests of the same content at a high level, providing very reliable scores across demographics and across time. And that’s been proven out by the 300 colleges who use it for scholarships and admissions and very much prize getting CLT students to be recruited to their schools.

And just one note on that, we’ve only had one student earn a perfect score in the exam. And we had 184,000 students take the CLT last year alone, probably about 200,000 this year. We were so excited.

He’s actually an intern with us now. Amazing. He did very well, very smart.

So that’s some of the issues and it really depends on where we go. Some places we’re very invited and there aren’t a ton of hostile questions and other places it’s much more dramatic.

Ed Tarnowski: Oh, that’s so nice to hear. And that’s really, really important information. So onto our last topic now, and I know it’s still in the works, but I’m very curious to hear more about this.

AP testing is a huge national conversation right now with new debates being sparked around what this type of standardized testing should look like. And because right now in many places and in most places, there’s one game in town. There is not much competition for this, but these tests are so essential for students when they’re looking into their higher ed careers.

So can you tell me a little bit about, you guys are working on an alternative to AP testing. Can you tell me a little bit about where that’s at, what it’s looking like and what we might expect?

Michael Torres: Yes, we are very much at the initial stages of creating this, but I’ll say that the second or third question I get from almost anybody, whether it’s a governor’s office or a state representative, a head of a private school is, are you going to create an alternative to the AP system? Because there’s a lot of discontent or at least desire for an alternative. The AP system has an even bigger monopoly than the SAT does coming from the college board.

They are also written into law everywhere. And that includes teacher training, grants to schools to administer it, local education agencies funding it, laws allowing for higher GPAs and college credit and a number of places you’ll find AP by name in law. It’s humongous and it’s in almost every state.

So it’s going to be a big effort legislatively to enable this new product we’re creating to have any use case, but we know there is a desire there. We’ve heard so from the K-12 and higher education schools we work with. That said, we’re planning at the end of next year, 2026, to launch one or two initial courses.

They are going to be created in coordination between the K-12 schools that we partner closely with and higher education institutions. There are several of these K-12 schools that have such high and rigorous standards on their own that the courses they create provide perfect fodder for a college level exam. We would have them work with professors from the universities we work with, acting as essentially a middleman saying, if you make a curriculum that you all both agree on what are in college credit for the students, we will create the exam for it and act as a middleman for you to ensure students are getting that college level exam and college level course at the K-12 level and that they can definitely use at our partner schools.

So that’s the initial gist. We are hoping to expand that over the coming years to more schools and more colleges that are willing to go on this project with us and allow for competition. And when I say allow for competition, I really mean it.

There was a really great report from the Goldwater Institute last year called Advanced Partiality. I recommend everyone please go read it. It was a learning experience for me as well.

The way things work right now with the AP system, essentially for students who you would consider advanced, the local government, local education agency, the state government are ceding authority over curriculum and what one would consider advanced for those students. The college board approves of what the curriculum is. They approve of the syllabus.

They create the exam. They create the course outline. They ensure that it gets the college credit and no one can know how, the process of doing all of that is extremely private.

The contracts are rigid. You cannot break the system, essentially. You cannot go outside the bounds that the college board sets for you.

So it’s essentially, and the New York Times has called it this as well, a second national school board that creates a secondary education system for those students we would consider excellent. And that’s not exactly how we consider how our education system should work. So the need for competition in this realm is significant just as much as there is needing for competition in which educational institutions students can choose from.

Whether or not they’d like to go to private school, public school, homeschool, that should be a choice as well. And there should be competition in terms of which courses they are choosing to be deemed advanced. So we’re working on that and very excited to see it launch next year.

Ed Tarnowski: Well, thank you so much, Michael, for the work you guys are doing at CLT. This is really exciting stuff. And choice and competition is not just important in where you choose to go to school, but also in the tests you take.

And it’s so impactful in the choice you make in going to higher education. So we really, really appreciate the commitment to competition and standardized testing. Well, Michael, before we go here today, where can our listeners find you?

Where can they read more about CLT and your work?

Michael Torres: Yes, certainly go to cltexam.com. You can learn more about CLT. We have a lot of information on there, everything about our exams, all of that.

I am on the Twitter machine at Mind of Torres. I don’t use it very often, but I do post about assessment policy and things like that from time to time. If there’s someone odd enough who wants to read about that sort of thing, you’ll find it there.

So yeah, welcome to give us a call, shoot us an email, and we’d love to talk to you about CLT.

Ed Tarnowski: Awesome, thanks for joining the show, Michael. Thank you. Thank you for joining for another episode of State of Choice.

For more information about EdChoice and our research, please feel free to visit edchoice.org and also feel free to find me on Twitter slash thex.com at Ed Tarnowski. I’m your host, Ed Tarnowski, also known as Ed with EdChoice. We’ll see you next time.