Sign up for Chalkbeat Indiana’s free daily newsletter to keep up with Indianapolis Public Schools, Marion County’s township districts, and statewide education news.
Indiana lawmakers have advanced a bill that could lead to more high school students taking the Classic Learning Test instead of the SAT or ACT for college admission.
If passed, SB 88 would require the state’s public colleges and universities to consider scores on the Classic Learning Test, or CLT, the same way they would consider SAT or ACT scores for admission. The CLT asks students to analyze pieces from “texts that have had a lasting influence on Western culture and society.”
The legislation would also require Indiana public schools to teach students the “success sequence,” a term coined for a series of steps that supporters have linked to avoiding poverty, but that critics say oversimplifies a systemic issue. The steps are graduating college, finding a full-time job, and having children only after marriage.
In addition, SB 88 would also allow prospective teachers in an alternate licensing pathway to submit their test scores on the SAT, ACT, CLT, or GRE in lieu of taking a licensing exam.
The testing change would be a boon to the growing number of students in private schools in Indiana, advocates said, as well as home-schooled students for whom the remotely proctored CLT is more accessible than the SAT or ACT, which must be taken on-location at a testing site.
The CLT has been a more accurate assessment for students at the Redeemer Classical School, a Christian microschool in Fort Wayne, said the school’s headmaster, Nathaniel Pullmann at the Wednesday hearing. The school teaches classical literature, science, and math, including works by Homer, Shakespeare, Newton, and Euclid, he said.
“If this bill is passed, the colleges in Indiana will find the same thing that hundreds of other colleges have found, that it is, in fact, a good predictor of educational success,” Pullman said. “The idea that including the works of the Western world as the reading samples that we’re going to use to assess their reading ability from, the idea that that’s discriminatory somehow, is just absurd.
Critics have raised concerns about potential cultural bias in the test, which asks students to answer questions about passages from both religious and secular texts by writers like Rudyard Kipling, Plato, Cicero, and Thomas Jefferson, as well as more recent nonfiction articles.
Others pointed out that the bill’s aims originate from model policy language put forth by groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization of conservative lawmakers.
“Why should Indiana accept a bill that has been cut and pasted from various outside think tanks?” said Russ Skiba, professor emeritus at Indiana University, and founder of the University Alliance fo Racial Justice.
The bill does not mandate that universities consider any test scores for admission. And most Indiana public colleges and universities are test optional, meaning students can choose whether to submit their SAT and ACT scores as part of their application. All Indiana University campuses follow this policy, as does the University of Southern Indiana, Indiana State University, and Ball State.
One notable exception is Purdue University, which briefly instituted a “test-flexible” policy during COVID, but reinstated a requirement for its West Lafayette campus that prospective students submit their SAT or ACT scores for the 2024 fall semester. Test scores are optional — but recommended — for the university’s Fort Wayne and Northwestern campuses.
Nine private colleges and universities in Indiana currently accept CLT scores — though some of those schools are test optional as well. Service academies also recently announced they would accept the test scores.
Some Indiana lawmakers support a ‘success sequence’
SB 88 would require public schools to teach the “success sequence,” of graduating high school, finding a full-time job, and having children only after marriage as part of good citizenship instruction.
“If students live that, the chance of them being poor is almost zero,” said GOP Sen. Spencer Deery.
But critics said the term oversimplifies systemic issues, and confuses causation and correlation.
Democratic senators also questioned the stigma the bill could create for students in single-parent households.
“My biological mother could have sat in one of these classrooms being pregnant in school, heading about how critically important it is that she be married,” said Sen. Andrea Hunley, a Democrat. “And I can’t help but think about how she might have felt.”
Author Sen. Gary Byrne, a Republican, removed language from the bill that would have required schools to teach the significance of the Ten Commandments as part of civics education, as well as restricted national identity instruction. However, on Monday, House lawmakers will discuss a separate bill to require public schools to display the Ten Commandments.
SB 88 advanced out of the Senate Education Committee and is moving to the full Senate for consideration.
Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. Contact her at aappleton@chalkbeat.org.
