Members of the Houston, Texas-based Saint Constantine School announced Thursday they will do away with all SAT prep and AP/PSAT programming.
School officials said in an emailed statement the SAT’s new adversity score prompted them to act.
As The Tennessee Star reported, the people responsible for the SAT exams now assign an adversity score to every student to consider his or her social and economic background.
Saint Constantine spokeswoman Megan Mueller (pictured above) said the school will purge itself of the SAT prep and AP/PSAT programming in 2020.
“We hope to see schools across the country do the same, and that more people will start to move toward the CLT as a sane option in the world of college admission and standardized testing,” Mueller said in the statement.
Mueller did not return The Star’s request for comment Thursday.
According to the school’s website, Saint Constantine educates through classical, Christian, practical education and is a mission of the Antiochian Orthodox Church in the Diocese of Mid-America.
Jackie Archer, affiliated with Tennessee Rising and Tennessee Textbook Advocates, which looks for bias in public school textbooks, told The Star earlier this week that politics motivates the change in the SAT scoring process.
“It is another left-wing strategy to break down the traditional merit-based systems of the past, further dumb-down Americans, and put ‘diversity’ above common-sense policy,” Archer said in an email Monday.
According to The Wall Street Journal, The College Board is a New York-based nonprofit that oversees the SAT.
Jeremy Tate, president of the Maryland-based CLT Exam, said the SAT favors the controversial Common Core standards — and he also said his CLT test is a better alternative.
“At CLT we will avoid speaking about the adversity score, but I will say this,” Tate said earlier this week.
“The College Board long, long ago abandoned any clear vision or philosophy for education. What they think the purpose of education is nobody really knows. For two millennia, from Plato through Augustine through Martin Luther on down to the present day in some circles the point of education has been the cultivation of virtue. It’s been to make people good, virtuous, responsible and civil. The College Board wants to remove any traces of character development or cultivation of virtue.”
Tate went on to say that adversity scores are “a symptom of a much bigger problem with the College Board.”
“They are the most powerful, most influential education company in the United States, and they can’t tell you the first thing about education,” Tate said.
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
