As Florida Governor Ron DeSantis continues to fight with the College Board over “wokeness,” the state Department of Education is looking for alternatives to the SAT and ACT college entrance exams.
State officials have met with Jeremy Wayne Tate, who founded the company Classic Learning Initiatives in 2015 as an alternative way to measure student ability, the Miami Herald reported Friday.
Tate’s educational philosophy focuses on using the Socratic method to teach the traditional Western literary canon, mostly made up of the works of white men. Company board member said test follows the “classical and great Christian tradition.”
The SAT and ACT have been criticized for years for incentivizing “teaching to the test” or for prioritizing test material over all other material that could also benefit a student’s education.
But recently, DeSantis and other conservatives have begun to attack the organization behind it, accusing the College Board of going too far with its diversity and inclusion efforts. A new AP course in African American studies offered by the College Board was rejected by DeSantis’ education department earlier this year, and the governor even floated the idea of banning AP classes in Florida.
Henry Mack, senior chancellor of the Florida department of education, supported Tate and the Classical Learning Test on social media.
Mack tweeted on Thursday that the test “offers an opportunity for all colleges and universities to prioritize.”
On Friday, he was more succinct: “CLT, not CRT!” (CRT, or critical race theory, has been a conservative boogeyman for years in the era of the Black Lives Matter movement.)
Mack said America’s public school system “often enforces or fosters the delusional belief that students should be taught to hate others based on race or that the free society we enjoy is inherently racist, stacked against the marginalized.”
“We’re happy that he likes what he’s doing,” Tate told the Miami Herald official from Florida. “We’re talking to people in the administration, again, almost every day now.”
Tate told the Miami Herald that the College Board’s SAT has become “increasingly ideological” because it “censors the entire Christian-Catholic intellectual tradition” and “other thinkers in the history of Western thought.” On Twitter, he called the College Board “one of the most ideologically extreme organizations in American education.”
His Twitter page contains at least one retweet from Jordan B. Peterson, a men’s rights activist, and his self-penned sentiments about the West in decline as people turn away from Christianity.
Tate also serves on the board of the Maryland Family Institute, a religious advocacy group that opposes abortion.
Friday, Tate try to deny the charges led a right-wing company — he said it was neither right-wing nor left-wing — by pointing out how the test included a section written by Karl Marx and Susan Rice, the national security adviser in the Obama administration. The company also boasts on its website that its sample tests “feature parts of Aristotle, Benjamin Franklin, Adam Smith, Pope John Paul II, and even Susan Rice.”
With DeSantis looking to run for the White House in 2024, his state’s feud with educational institutions appears far from over.