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Editor’s Note: The following guest commentary reflects the views and opinions of the author alone and does not necessarily represent the official views of Texas Policy Research, its staff, board, or affiliated organizations. Guest submissions are lightly edited for grammar, formatting, clarity, and length while preserving the author’s voice and arguments.
The Texas State Board of Education voted in late January to add the Classic Learning Test, or CLT, to the short list of exams that can earn students a “gold star” on their high school transcript, a recognition currently reserved for strong performance on exams like the SAT, ACT, Advanced Placement, and International Baccalaureate.
The CLT is not a longstanding fixture of American college admissions. It was founded in 2015 by Jeremy Tate, a former college counselor at a private Catholic school in Maryland, and was designed as a deliberately different alternative to the SAT and ACT, one explicitly aligned with classical and Christian educational traditions, drawing its reading passages from works the test’s creators consider foundational to Western thought. For its first eight years, the test’s market consisted largely of homeschoolers and students at private classical and religious schools, with fewer than 25,000 students taking it through 2023. Adoption by public-university systems began with Florida in 2023, and over the past two years, several states, including Arkansas, Oklahoma, Indiana, Wyoming, and now Texas, have advanced policies encouraging the CLT’s use in admissions, scholarships, or performance recognition. The advocates who have driven the push view classical and faith-based educational traditions as underserved by the dominant testing landscape. Whatever one thinks of that broader debate, it is the policy environment that produced the SBOE’s decision, and it matters when evaluating whether the test has earned the same recognition Texas already extends to the SAT, ACT, AP, and IB.
Texas has not approved the CLT as a college entrance exam. Colleges are not required to accept it. Yet this decision signals to students and families that the CLT carries the same weight as long-established benchmarks. For many of my students, especially those planning to attend universities where CLT scores hold little or no value, that signal could be misleading.
I’m a high school guidance counselor in a rural Texas district. My job isn’t just helping students graduate; it’s helping them make decisions about admissions, scholarships, and affordability. In rural communities like ours, where counseling offices are small and resources are stretched, accuracy matters. There’s less margin for confusion, and even less room for costly mistakes.
The SAT and ACT are known quantities that my students, their parents, and even their grandparents have taken. Admissions officers know what these scores mean. That shared understanding protects students and families from false assumptions about readiness.
As a counselor, my job is to help students and families understand what their test results mean in real-world terms: whether a student qualifies for a scholarship, is competitive for admission, or is likely to need additional support in college. They use this information to make decisions that steer the direction of their lives. Are CLT results reliable and trustworthy enough to shape these decisions?
When I go to the websites of the other admissions exams, I can find published research and data on how students do and how well the tests predict how they’ll do in college. For the CLT, the picture is much thinner, and what exists has been independently challenged. In April 2024, the Iowa Board of Regents commissioned a formal review of the CLT and concluded there was “no evidence to support the predictive efficacy of the CLT” for students at the kinds of public universities Texas families send their children to. The report noted that the test’s validity research drew almost entirely from homeschool, private, and charter school students, not from the populations attending public university systems. On that basis, the Iowa board declined to allow the CLT in its Regent Admissions Index. The CLT has since published its own concordance report claiming the test assesses skills comparable to the SAT. The College Board, which administers the SAT, has formally rejected that concordance, stating that the CLT’s methodology does not meet industry standards and that the resulting score tables cannot be validated for high-stakes uses like admissions and scholarship decisions.
I’ve also read CLT’s claims that its exam is highly rigorous. In Texas, rigor means alignment with what our students are expected to learn, better known as the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS).
Based on my professional review of the CLT’s published content outlines, its content does not clearly align with TEKS, particularly in math, where it emphasizes too much geometry and not enough high-school-level algebra. When coursework, graduation requirements, and college readiness are evaluated through a TEKS-based lens, that misalignment complicates advising and clouds expectations.
I can explain what an SAT or ACT score generally means. I can’t do that with the CLT. In smaller districts like mine, where trust between schools and families is essential, introducing a test we cannot fully explain risks undermining that trust.
This generation of students is stepping into a competitive and unforgiving landscape. They deserve benchmarks that are clear, credible, and widely understood. Parents deserve confidence that effort still matters, and that achievement means the same thing statewide, whether a student lives in the hills of Central Texas or Houston’s inner loop.
Before Texas elevates an unproven test into a high-stakes signal, we should demand evidence. When scholarships, admissions decisions, and students’ futures are on the line, we can’t rely on promises. We need proof.
About the Author: Leanne Johnson is a Texas school counselor with a decade of experience guiding high school students through college admissions, scholarships, and postsecondary planning. She writes from firsthand experience helping students in rural Texas navigate the college readiness requirements that state education policy decisions shape.
Disclosure: The author writes from her professional experience as a Texas school counselor. She has no financial interest in the policy discussed and is not affiliated with any organization involved in the CLT’s adoption or opposition. She is not a registered lobbyist. The views expressed are her own.
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