Did you know that the biggest influence in modern American education isn’t the curriculum or even the teachers, but college entrance exams?

Every year, millions of students focus their studies around getting high scores on the SAT and ACT… The problem? As these tests have competed with each other over the decades, it’s become a race to the bottom: the test that passes students the easiest wins, and colleges are beginning to get wise to the fact that a high SAT or ACT score no longer guarantees an intelligent student.

Today on Veritas Vox, Jeremy Tate, the CEO of the Classic Learning Test (CLT), reveals how what was once an off-beat SAT/ACT alternative is now truly rivaling these mainstream entrance exams and proving that those with classical knowledge are the best lifelong learners.

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode.

Marlin Detweiler:

Hello and welcome to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we have with us Jeremy Tate, the founder of the Classical Learning Test. Jeremy has been with us before, but it's been about three years. Jeremy, welcome.

Jeremy Tate:

Great to be back. Thanks for having me.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah. You bet. So just as a way of becoming familiar to people that may not have heard the other episode, and to our audience, tell us a little bit about yourself, your family, your education, your career.

Jeremy Tate:

Yeah. Grew up on the West Coast in Portland, Oregon, back when it was pretty normal and a nice place to grow up.

Marlin Detweiler:

“Back when it was pretty normal” implies something about today, Jeremy.

Jeremy Tate:

I know. Yeah, dad was ATF. I always thought that I would be doing that. And he was in law enforcement, had a dramatic conversion to Christ as a senior in high school. And in the course of pursuing the Christian life, really discovered the classical tradition. I didn't know there was a name for it at the time.

But I always say my real education didn't come from school at all. I hated school. I graduated high school with a 2.9. It came from conversion to Christ. And I started reading on my own to get to know my faith, to get to know God. And it was really one summer, summer of 2002.

I was living in a tent in Alaska. I had no access to technology and read Crime and Punishment to try to impress a girl. And that was the beginning of my love for classical literature, and just kind of the opened my eyes to this whole big, beautiful tradition that we get to be a part of passing down.

Marlin Detweiler:

I did not know that you would do such a radical thing as to just go off the grid like that. That's impressive.

Jeremy Tate:

Oh, it was great. But what 21 year old boy, when the girl of your dreams breaks up with you? I mean, the logical thing to do is drive to Alaska to live in a tent and sulk for the summer. Which is exactly what I did.

Marlin Detweiler:

That is too funny. I'll tell you what young men, young, single men do need, shall we say, flexibility in what they end up doing.

Jeremy Tate:

And you know what, though? I learned after the fact that it was my parents like, biggest fight ever because that is called my dad and my dad. Can I drive the car to Alaska from Louisiana? And he's like, sure. You know. And then I'm like, great. And then my mom was like, what?

He's doing, what he said he could. My dad served in Vietnam. He got wounded. He went in there with his best friends from Texas Tech. It was a sobering adventure, but it was an adventure, you know, it was life changing and a really powerful way for me.

It was that summer, you know, we got into all kinds of trouble and saw the world, saw this great country we get to live in, and had a lot of time to sit in a tent and read at the same time.

Marlin Detweiler:

That's really cool. I'm sure that has been the subject of many stories with your family. Speaking of your family, I think the last time that we talked on Vox, you had a three year old as a youngest and quite a gap from some of the others. Do you have any to fill in underneath what was a three?

Jeremy Tate:

Yeah, we've got six kids down. So my 18 year old just went off to the US Coast Guard Academy. So we just we dropped her off a couple days ago. Thank you. Yeah. And then we've got a 15 year old boy, a 13 year old boy, a six year old boy and a four year old boy as well.

And Marlin, this is the worst. This past year we had six kids in six different schools, and which sounds insane unless we kind of go through them all. But, you know, so we have homeschooled for years. We've done every model university, you name it. We've just kind of done the tour. And so it's now 45, six kids in. We feel like we have some sense of what we're doing finally.

Marlin Detweiler:

Let me connect that to the CLT. One of the things that I'm certain of is that it has benefited you in understanding your customers.

Jeremy Tate:

I think that's right. I think that's right. You know, it's a wild landscape. It's kind of been the Wild West. And, you know, Marlin, you've been doing this before we started recording. You've been doing classical since before classical was cool. I mean, you were doing this in 1996. You know, this wasn't even on anybody's radar. I mean, the people who were doing this in the 1990s were the people who kind of independently started thinking through first principles on their own and just were like they were the ones saying, what are we doing?

Marlin Detweiler:

And so we had a lot of help. Our first 1996 was when Veritas was incorporated, but 1993 was our first initiative in the starting of the Geneva School. And I would be remiss if I didn't say, even though we were pioneers wearing pioneer boots, using a machete through the educational quagmire. But we had the help of the folks at Logos School in Moscow, Idaho.

Doug Wilson, who was somebody that we interacted with closely and probably even more beneficial than all of that, was the fact that R.C. Sproul was a part of the starting of the first school that we were there in Orlando. And as you might expect, that provided us instant credibility. Yeah. And some really good attention to marketing efforts and that sort of thing. So we, we all of those things conspired together in a providential way that we couldn't have done by ourselves.

Jeremy Tate:

Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:

So anyway, but you started the Classical Learning Test. We've covered a little bit of why you did it and the history previously, but give us a snippet so that we can set the stage for what's happened in the last few years.

Jeremy Tate:

Yeah, I'll give this kind of a kind of a two minute. So, so the historical context, to me, it's very interesting so that the history of education in America and, you know, a lot of it is in some ways for the first half, it doesn't change a lot. Right? It's kind of Christian. Paideia dominates; it's in the water. It's everywhere. Right. You're talking.

Marlin Detweiler:

About the 16th century into the early 19th century, I guess.

Jeremy Tate:

Yeah, 100%. Yeah. So much so that even in the colonial period, if you would have asked a school, are you a Christian school? They wouldn't even know what you meant. They're like, yeah. Like what? Yeah. We're a school like of course, you know, and then we really take this radical turn in the 20th century with kind of the progressives hijacking mainstream education through, you know, compulsory education.

And so the College Board, as we see it, Marlin has really been the big player, one of the big players, maybe the biggest player since 1899.

Marlin Detweiler:

When you say big player, really unpack that because I'm going to guess that the listener isn't inclined to fully appreciate the fact that with the College Board, it works its way down to what are we going to teach when within the public school system, in a very dominant way?

Jeremy Tate:

Yeah, 100%. And think of this, you know, so Harvard is at the table. So the College Board forms and December 22nd, 1899 at Columbia University in New York. But Harvard's at the table. Princeton. A lot of the Ivy feeder schools are there. The big elite New England boarding schools are there. And they knew one of the things they knew was the power of an admissions test in the educational ecosystem, the Harvard entrance exam that for, you know, centuries was basically the same kind of tests.

Students were translating Greek and Latin to get in. What that meant is that if you wanted to go to Harvard, you had to master Greek and Latin, that it shaped your primary and secondary education. The entrance exam alone did that. And so College Board forms, they launched the SAT in 1926 Act forms in 1859. But really, it's played this really powerful role.

AP comes out in 1954. And for a lot of students now, Marlin, so many students AP shapes their whole day AP Advanced Placement. It's the way they understand America literature. And this stuff is nutty. It is nutty.

Marlin Detweiler:

Let me score that with something that you may be familiar with. Laurie and I have been invited to be on the committee that judges applications for the Coolidge Foundation scholarships. If you're not familiar with that, the Coolidge Foundation's very well funded. And this past year, I believe they gave away around ten, four years scholarships to any institution you want to go to.

So it didn't matter if it was Harvard or wherever it was. We have done this now for three years. Most of the children that end up getting to our level, the level at which we are as a semifinalist level, there are ten committees like ours. We're only one of ten. We get ten applicants to go through and we have to pick two to go to the finals.

So that's what we do. All of the applicants are dominated with presenting their AP test scores.

Jeremy Tate:

Yep. Yeah, yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:

That's how important it is in their thinking and in Coolidge's thinking to that world.

Jeremy Tate:

I mean, it's really bad. I mean, you look at something like AP lit, right? We know this Christians, we own the Western literary tradition objectively, the best literature, the best stories in the history of the world are from the Christian tradition, from from Augustine and City of God and Confessions, you know, through Dante and Boethius and, you know, Bunyan and CS Lewis and Flannery O'Connor, Tolkien, you name it.

Christians write the best books. Look at what they recommend for AP lit. It's a little tiny, tiny bit of Shakespeare. And then it's a global perspectives, which we know, their global perspectives, global citizenship, all of this icky global stuff. It just means anti-Western, anti-Christian is what it really means. And so we want to call the College board out on that and provide something better.

Marlin Detweiler:

And that's what that's what birthed CLT.

Jeremy Tate:

100%. Yeah. And the immediate context SAT and Act aligned with the Common Core. And honestly, Marlin, I got lucky. My idea was actually not CLT. Everybody was outraged at SAT and Act aligned with Common Core, and I thought I had a business idea. I thought, you know what? Somebody making the new test, whoever's making this.

Everybody was asking, you know, the home school folks that worked with said, look, we reject Common Core. Why are the only two college entrance exams Common Core aligned? So I assumed well, obviously everybody's upset. Somebody is making a new test. It's not Common Core aligned.

We started researching and thought, wow, this is wild. Nobody's doing it. And I found myself in what felt like a very providential position. Right? I was a college counselor. I knew a lot of people in college admissions. I knew, you know, the SAT and Act really well. And it seemed like, man, there hasn't been an alternative in a long time.

And I was always, you know, running an SAT prep company. I was always just confused and discouraged why they put this stuff on the test that they did. And it was always a token, you know, feminist passage and all just the same kinds of stuff on every test. And, and, but leaving off the good stuff, you know, and no Christian source material and that conveys to students that the Christian intellectual tradition doesn't matter.

And so I'm much more concerned about the influence of the SAT and the College Board and shaping education. Then I am in giving classically educated kids a great shot because they're going to crush any tests. I know that.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, that's really true. People sometimes wonder in our world with our online school, how will my kids do on the standardized tests from your curriculum? My answer is this the education will prepare them better than a direct approach, but it won't hurt if you take a special course in how to take the test, because that will give you some very pragmatic answers to how to actually sort out probabilities of answers and that sort of thing when you're not certain.

And so a lot of our people do take a College Board's prep test, but it's built on their robust classical education, and it's just a little bit of a help on top of the big help they get from their education.

Jeremy Tate:

Sure.

Marlin Detweiler:

I know that you are increasingly valued, that the test is increasingly valued within the classical ed community. Talk to us a little bit about your market penetration there over the last three years and how that's happening and where you see that going, and then talk to us about how it's stepping outside that world.

Jeremy Tate:

Yeah, yeah. And I think over the past couple of years, Marlin, the bigger story for us has been state legislatures, you know, states seeing they’re losing students, you know, that you're in a place like Texas, Arizona, every family wants to be in Valor or Great Hearts or one of these classical charter schools. They don't want to be in the regular public school.

So what are they doing? They're making the public schools a lot more like classical charter schools. Right? And I mean, you look at the the reading list, the new reading list that came out of it looks like a classical charter school, you know. Yes. And so we're seeing a ton of interest from, you know, the Department of War actually, that, you know, in communication there with the Department of War oversees 170 schools that are very influential, that are K-12 schools.

Marlin Detweiler:

Both know it's it's the largest school district in America.

Jeremy Tate:

That's. Yes. That's right.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah. It's run by a guy who has a great fondness for classical Christian education, Pete Hegseth.

Jeremy Tate:

That's right. And so they're clearly they're going in a classical direction with these schools. And these are schools that people pay attention to, you know, and they're going in a classical direction. We've had a ton of state with sins in state legislatures. I mean, Iowa, Indiana, uncW, Chapel Hill. You went to NC state. I know NC State now accepts CLT.

And so a lot of I think folks have been looking and saying, you know, they're getting a better education over at these classical schools. Hey, we've got all this infrastructure, we've got the sports fields, and why can't we why can't we be a little more like that here? You know, so I don't think you're never going to get a school that's like, you know, Veritas in Richmond or Regents in Austin or something like that.

But the influence of the classical education movement is already impacting public schools, and they're going to be dusting off their Shakespeare, and they're going to be becoming a little less woke and crazy and probably a little more normie again.

Marlin Detweiler:

Is it in your planning and in your efforts to really capture the college and university system in America with acceptance of the CLT?

Jeremy Tate:

100%? We want universal adoption. You know, our goal when you walk into our office. Marlin, we’ve got to get you down to Annapolis.

Marlin Detweiler:

We're not far away in the summer in Lancaster here. My wife will go there any time. I'll take her.

Jeremy Tate:

Yeah. I don't golf, but people love the Naval Academy golf course. And so we got to get you down here. But, you know, you walk into our office and there's a plaque. The plaque is made to look very old. It's bronze. And if you read it initially, it looks like a boring history of a standardized test. Who cares?

But if you pay a little more attention towards the bottom, it says in 2040, the CLT surpassed the SAT and Act as the number one college entrance exam globally. And we have a kind of a moment every morning we walk in and we give it a little pound and we're like, that's what we're here to do to make this come true.

So yeah, we want to be number one. We're very competitive. We try to embrace. One of my good buddies got a job at Under Armor out of college. He played lacrosse at Cornell. I talked to him a few months into his job at Under Armor. This is the early days of Under Armor, you know? And I'm like, how is it?

What's it like? And he's like, nuts. Like, what do you mean? He's like, everybody's psycho. Like, everybody was like a D1 inside linebacker. They all just want to rip people's heads off, you know?

Marlin Detweiler:

And they're working like there's still on the on the field.

Jeremy Tate:

Yeah, yeah. And I'm like, we need some of that around here, you know. And so we've got this funny mix of people who want to like promote, you know, the contemplative life. But like, you know, we're going to we've got to kick some ass to do that. And so that's what we're trying to do.

Marlin Detweiler:

That's great. So 2040 I, we would call that a “BHAG”, a big hairy audacious goal.

Jeremy Tate:

That's that's the idea. That's the idea. Yeah. But we're actually a little bit ahead of pace to be there, you know, and we really thought the hardest thing was going to be getting the service academies on board West Point Naval Academy Air Force. It's been such an incredible providential story. In fact, I had one of my good buddies, one of my own friends three years ago.

He became the provost at the Naval Academy, and I went to him when he got the post. And, you know, I want to have the conversation. And he finally said to me, look, Jeremy, he's like, I love you. I love CLT. So but it's not going to happen at the Naval Academy. Like, what do you mean? He said, look, there's just an ocean of bureaucracy.

This is three years ago. He said, nobody knows how to navigate it. And the only way it's ever going to happen here is if it happens from the very top. Well, fast forward about a year and a half and my phone starts blowing up and people are like, Pete Hegseth just got added. That's awesome. Cool. I like Pete great.

And they're like, no. He controls admission standards to the service academies. The guy already wrote about CLT in his book and he promoted it. You know, he talked about it various places. So we're like, cool. He just needs to do the thing that he was recommending colleges to do ditch the SAT and replace it with the CLT. And he absolutely bowled through the Pentagon bureaucracy.

Marlin Detweiler:

Believable.

Jeremy Tate:

A lot of folks there tried to hold it up, and absolutely he would not have it.

Marlin Detweiler:

That's well, that's the way to get it done. I got to tell you something parenthetically, because I am so proud of our students this year. This is the year. The graduation year was 2026, in case is being watched sometime later we had six students get in the service academies.

Jeremy Tate:

Amazing. Fantastic.

Marlin Detweiler:

Three West Point, two Naval, one Air Force.

Jeremy Tate:

Okay, okay.

Marlin Detweiler:

I've never known a school that got six, but I'm very proud of our kids.

Jeremy Tate:

Yeah, yeah. And they really want to. I mean, the way Pete seeing this and he endorsed CLT is, you know, he called it the new gold standard. And they're really pushing it down right now through admissions and wanting to make it really clear. The look, if you want to put your best foot forward, this is a test that's rooted in the great texts of the Western intellectual tradition.

And now we're having a ton of students. They didn't go to classical schools. They didn't get they weren't homeschooled. But they're taking the CLT because they know the service academies are looking for it now. Wow.

Marlin Detweiler:

What a change. Tell our audience in very practical terms, what distinguishes the CLT? I couldn't answer that question. If somebody came up to me on the street and said, why do you recommend the CLT? I say, because it really ties better into what we're doing educationally. But what do the questions look like? Well, I don't know.

Jeremy Tate:

So a couple major points of differentiate. The biggest obviously is going to be source material. So two thirds of everything that is on a CLT is from the author bank. So you go to our website and you look at the author bank. And it's the luminaries from the classical Western intellectual tradition, you know, going back to, you know, Aristotle, Plato, you know, through, you know, the modern world, you know, today, the other a couple other big things, though, especially right now, you know, the new SAT, the longest reading passages is 120 words.

The shortest is 25 words. Every question on the verbal side has its own reading passage, and the passages are again as short as 25 words, which is not even a long tweet.

Marlin Detweiler:

So this is the drive through convenience store mentality to testing.

Jeremy Tate:

100%. Yeah, 100%. And so CLT there's long form passages. You know, there's passages that are 600-700 words and right now and part of the College Board's rationale, I mean, you can't make this up, you know, is that this isn't how students are consuming information, meaning, you know, they're consuming information on Instagram and TikTok and they're not used to reading things of substance.

Well, shouldn't we wouldn't it be more important to hold the line so they can ingest, you know, like important substantive text instead of change the test?

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah. Instagram and TikTok become the standard of education in America. I don't think so.

Jeremy Tate:

Yeah. Yeah. So the people who are in the know I mean, how is it an Ivy League if you go with all of the big players, you know, admissions, provosts, all the deans, I mean, they all know they all know the, the new SAT is a joke. And they said, look, half of our students are applying with over a 1500. And so the SAT is no longer even doing its job of differentiating.

Marlin Detweiler:

It doesn't differentiate students.

Jeremy Tate:

Exactly among especially top students. You know, any seriously classically educated student should be able to get, you know, 14, 1500 on the Saturday. It's not a serious test. And this is a really big problem. And I say this as a free market guy. I love the market usually. But here's the problem usually how does the market work?

Right. Veritas or Classical Academic Press or Memoria Press. They maybe go to Veritas because of quality and because of price, you know, so typically any two organizations compete on those two fronts quality and price and service. Well, the market rewards the dumbest test when it comes to college entrance, right? Why does it why does it do that? Well, the job of the test is to get you access to admissions and scholarships.

And so there's a market force that rewards the test that's easier. And so the SAT and Act have been competing now for 60-70 years on who can be dumber. And right now the College Board is like, hey, we're basically getting rid of reading all together. You're just going to read, you know. And so it's we'll see what the act comes up with next.

If they can come up with something even stupider than that.

Marlin Detweiler:

I know you're a runner. So I've got this metaphor in my head. And here you are running a race. The Act and the SAT are out in front of you, and you are behind them. And it's by 2040 that you want to pass them on a race in one way, metaphorically, probably never ends. They're looking over their shoulder and seeing you coming. What do they think?

Jeremy Tate:

I think we went from being a joke to being a little bit annoying, to now we're a problem, you know? And it's been fun seeing that transition. In fact, I met the CEO of the College Board at a, at a event in D.C. a couple of months ago. You know, and I've talked trash online for a decade.

And so it was a bit awkward, you know, as we're shaking hands and kind of making small talk. And he kind of preemptively wanted to forgive me for like, being a jerk. And I tried to clarify that I was not apologizing. I mean, I think the College Board has been super toxic. And actually, I'll say this.

And one of my heroes and dear friends, Robby, Georgia, Princeton, Robby, said to me in the first year of CLT, he said that the College Board is the single most influential organization in the mission drift of Christian and Catholic schools over the past hundred years. The single most. Right? Wow. I mean, think about it as a hypothetical.

Imagine for a second. Imagine if on the SAT everybody always knew, okay, that's where you're going to see Aristotle. That's where you may see Saint Saint Augustine. That's where you may see Martin Luther. How would that shape what happens in the classroom? Right. So but instead what they've done is they've basically censored the entire Western Christian intellectual tradition instead.

But parents understand that this is a lever to go after. And I think, you know, we've got a few friends at the College Board that are wanting to make moves eventually. It's a big organization, you know, and they say, yeah, they.

Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. And what they tell us is that the College Board is very much intimidated by just by the enthusiasm there is. And it's not it's not CLT, I mean, CLT itself. Oh, we are is essentially infrastructure of the of the classical movement. You know, we're kind of roads and bridges, you know, and the way it was explained to me by some of the leaders in this movement early on is like, look, this movement needs to scale.

The goal of the whole classical education movement is to get rid of the modifier classical. It just needs to be education again to what it always was before. Yeah. And that as long as we're looking to the secular progressives as the measuring stick, the movement's going to be very limited. So we're hoping to provide that new, that new measuring stick.

Marlin Detweiler:

That new standard. What a great mission. And what's really funny to think about is based on the current cultural climate and any foreseeable cultural climate, even with the warmth that we hear from certain government sources to classical Christian education, with ESA funding the tax credit program out of the big beautiful bill that begins in 2027, all of those things still make it virtually impossible for the SAT and the ACT to actually change in a meaningful way to provide you reasonable competition. You're in great shape. I envy where you are businesswise. That's remarkable.

Jeremy Tate:

Thank you. We can only exist because there were giants like yourself, Chris Perrin, you know, Martin Katharine that were building this movement for decades and decades. And now it's gotten to this point where it's clearly the alternative to the failing secular, progressive model.

Marlin Detweiler:

Thank you so much, Jeremy. This has been great to reconnect and to extend the conversation. Maybe we won't wait three years and maybe we'll come see you in in Maryland. That would be great. We love that here.

Jeremy Tate:

Thanks for having me.

Marlin Detweiler:

Thank you for joining us on this episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. We hope to see you next time.