A recent Dallas Morning News editorial board article desperately wants Texas to pump the brakes on the Classic Learning Test (CLT). Why? It’s worried about politics creeping into college admissions and about the CLT’s thinner track record compared with the SAT and ACT.
But let’s be honest: the politics and the diluted standards arrived a long, long time ago, and they came from the very tests the DMN is urging us to protect.
So, let’s take a closer look at the SAT and ACT.
During my years as a professor and administrator, I’ve watched with increasing alarm what has happened to both the SAT and the ACT. Over the past three decades, both the SAT and ACT have executed several redesigns widely criticized as politicized efforts that diluted academic standards in response to equity pressures and market competition.
In 1995, the College Board, which designs and sells the SAT, “recentered” its scores so that average performance, which had declined for decades, was artificially reset near 500, effectively inflating reported results without corresponding gains in student ability. Reading passages have been cut to “25 to 150 words,” or the length of a social media post.
The “analogies” section of the SAT—long regarded as a rigorous test of verbal reasoning—were eliminated in 2005 partly because critics claimed they were culturally biased and disconnected from high school curricula. Under David Coleman, a principal architect of the Common Core, the 2016 SAT redesign explicitly aligned the exam with those contested K-12 standards, shifting it further from pure aptitude measurement toward curriculum-linked achievement and prompting charges that the test was being subordinated to a political education agenda.
The College Board’s 2019 “adversity score” (later rebranded “Landscape”) attempted to contextualize scores with neighborhood and school socioeconomic data, an equity-driven intervention that drew bipartisan backlash before being scaled back and eventually discontinued.
The ACT has likewise marched to the beat of the DEI drummer. It made the science section optional beginning in 2025; it shortened the overall exam, and it reduced question volume—evidence of what George W. Bush correctly labeled, “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
Taken together, these changes tell a consistent story. Over the past 30 years, the SAT and ACT have increasingly been reshaped to satisfy political demands for greater accessibility and demographic balance rather than to preserve the academic rigor that once made them respected measures of college readiness.
Having completed our review of the unhappy history of the SAT and ACT, why would the DMN be so intent on continuing to carry water for them?—especially when the CLT takes a different, sounder path?
The CLT’s reading passages come from the books that actually shaped our country—Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, the Federalist Papers, and other lasting works. It refuses to soft-pedal difficulty just to match the latest educational fad. To be sure—and contrary to the DMN—that’s not “conservative politics.” That’s classical education. It’s the same method that once defined liberal learning and still produces students who can think, write, and reason.
Yes, the recent Texas A&M review found that the CLT has less “Texas-specific” predictive data. Of course it has less—how could it be otherwise?—not only is it new but our public universities have largely kept it at arm’s length. So, what we have here is a “Catch-22”: limited acceptance produces limited local data, which is then used to justify limited acceptance. However, the same A&M study still found the CLT rigorous and reliable enough for consideration. Expanding its use is how we get the fuller evidence everyone says they want.
Our students and universities deserve options. The SAT-ACT monopoly—which has already bent to ideology—doesn’t serve rigor. Letting the CLT compete does. Students who’ve been formed by classical texts shouldn’t be strait-jacketed by a system redesigned around other priorities. Texas public universities should be free to weigh the scores and see the results for themselves.
In sum, nothing says “open-minded journalism” like the DMN sprinting to the barricades to shield its twin darlings, the SAT and ACT, from any upstart that might actually raise standards. The DMN is therefore right for the wrong reason—yes, politics has no business setting academic standards. But the way to keep politics out is not to defend continuing to prop up an already-corrupted status quo. It’s to open the door to an alternative that puts classical knowledge and clear thinking first.
Texas should expand the Classic Learning Test. Our students—and the integrity of our universities—will be better for it.