Students attending U.S. military academies and those operating under the Department of Defense Education Activity may soon be able to satisfy government testing mandates with an updated exam that emphasizes traditional math and the Great Books, the Federalist reported on Tuesday.
The latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act that is making its way through Congress will mandate that DODEA schools offer students in 11th grade the college admissions test of their parent’s choice. The change would permit students to take the Classic Learning Test, an alternative to the SAT and ACT college entry exams. Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., first proposed the legislation this past spring.
Roughly 70,000 children attend DODEA schools that are on U.S. military facilities throughout the globe.
“Accepting the CLT alongside the SAT and ACT opens the door for talented students from every educational background. It’s about making sure our military academies attract the best and brightest,” Banks said in a statement to the outlet. “Many homeschool students take the CLT, which focuses on reading, logic, and classic texts in a way other tests don’t. These are good skills to take to the academies and putting this into law would ensure future administrations can’t unilaterally undo what Secretary Hegseth is trying to achieve.”
Alternatives to the SAT and Advanced Placement test arose after years of politically correct adjustments and a continual lowering of standards. For example, the AP European history class made no mention of Christopher Columbus, the AP U.S. history class “gives no hint of America’s defining culture of liberty, and all AP history classes sideline the influence of religion on world affairs and give short shrift to the history of liberty while emphasizing “social justice,” according to a 2020 analysis by the National Association of Scholars.
The CLT was founded in 2015 by former high school English teacher Jeremy Tate who had noticed traditional learning had slowly left much of America’s public classroom. Tate created a less politicized curriculum and a standardized test for K-12 education. Noting that invariably teachers will “teach to the test,” the CLT aims to give students an education that “deserves their attention.”
“You can fundamentally reorient education with a different assessment that draws from the Western tradition,” Tate said.
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