Michael Torres

Husband. Dad. Navy vet. Director Legislative Affairs for Classic Learning Test.

[Michael Torres @MindofTorres]

That would be logical!

[Steve McGuire @sfmcguire79]

Next logical step for the Ivies: Accept the @CLT_Exam.

[Michael Torres @MindofTorres]

Classy.

[John Sailer @JohnDSailer]

NEW: The Mellon Foundation gave $1.5 million to establish a "center for the defense of academic freedom."

In audio I've obtained, the group's leader says his goal is to undermine the newly launched classical civics centers: "map who these f---ers are... and knock them out." 🧵

[Neetu Arnold @neetu_arnold]

My new @ManhattanInst report makes the case for state legislatures to take up the fight against grade inflation at public universities

Universities struggle to maintain strong policies on grading reform b/c institutional incentives discourage serious internal reform⬇️
https://t.co/xbsIVZa2Fr

[Marc Porter Magee 🎓 @marcportermagee]

NAEP results by school type: the gap between Catholic schools and public schools has never been larger

[Shaun 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇺🇸 @shaunvlog_]

Apparently I have just started a war among my new American friends 😮‍💨🫡

[🇺🇸 The American Culturist 🇺🇸 @MericaCulture]

A German visiting Auburn, Alabama, to watch Lionel Messi and Argentina play Iceland stopped at a Buc-ee's and ate brisket sandwiches on a stack of deer feeder corn.

A sentence never before uttered in all of human history.

[Michael Torres @MindofTorres]

Read this and then share it with everyone you know and then read it again!

"Critical thinking is not a generic skill that can be taught independently of content ... Thinking depends on knowing."

Via @rpondiscio.

https://t.co/gw3jtYksmH

[Michael Torres @MindofTorres]

@sfmcguire79 The SAT isn’t the SAT that these professors remember. It was completely remade in 2024 in reaction to test optional policies in an attempt to attract students. The UC system’s decision had ramifications that hit tests too. https://t.co/cKbyLs0XqT

[Felicity Ropp @licityropp]

"SC students are as smart, as capable and as full of God-given promise as any, anywhere. When we believe in their purpose and potential, we give them the confidence to believe in themselves."

Great piece by @ellenfored on the "South Carolina Surge"!🌊

https://t.co/0I9Cn6FPe5

[Joshua D Phillips @JoshPhillipsPhD]

Our education standards have gotten so low, the @CLT_Exam seems revolutionary. 🙄

*it’s literally reading Western Canon passages longer than a paragraph 🙄. You know, basic education stuff

“Unlike the better-known tests, the texts are Western canon.”

https://t.co/HYAtCa6r1w

[Michael Torres @MindofTorres]

Business programs aren't "scholarship". They are white-collar job training programs. And that's fine. But we should all understand them correctly.

[chad wellmon @cwellmon]

If the claim is that bad scholarship in some fields has eroded faith in those fields & in higher ed, why not study fields that award most BAs: business & health (33% of all BAs). Relatively speaking: few major in the humanities. When is the biz major analysis coming?

[Lauren Chen @TheLaurenChen]

Students perform worse now than 20 years ago

But SAT scores remain consistent

How?

The SAT has literally gotten easier

It's why many in the classical education & homeschool movements prefer @CLT_Exam instead

Great interview @JeremyTate41!

https://t.co/6rH3FADZjX

[Jeremy Wayne Tate @JeremyTate41]

They can say what they want. We are not changing the test.

“The left, meanwhile, has turned its nose up at the test. In Indiana…only one Democrat voted for it…critics say the classical sources the test relies on are “racist, sexist, homophobic.” https://t.co/9r030sjcit

[Michael Torres @MindofTorres]

Exactly.

[Robert Pondiscio @rpondiscio]

What we now call "classical education" would have been called, until fairly recently, simply "education."

[Michael Torres @MindofTorres]

Very true. Too many parents are completely befuddled when their demands that their child be given special treatment are refused.

[Daniel Buck, “Youngest Old Man in Ed Reform” @MrDanielBuck]

This is a real problem that conservatives don't want to talk about

Parents are not the only reason for lowered standards... but too often they are one of the reasons

[Michael Torres @MindofTorres]

For too many Americans, higher education is more about earning status than earning an education. This simultaneously degrade to the reputation of higher education and increases demand for the credential it comes with.

https://t.co/1q801yPDIv

[Michael Torres @MindofTorres]

@jgrantaddison That includes the new version of the SAT: https://t.co/bhtB3datDO

[Michael Torres @MindofTorres]

@ZoharAtkins The SAT is not what it used to be: https://t.co/bhtB3datDO

[Michael Torres @MindofTorres]

Sad, but true.

[Dale Chu @Dale_Chu]

It used to be a reasonable argument that GPA was a better predictor of college success than a one-off test. But severe grade compression has destroyed that utility.

[Michael Torres @MindofTorres]

“ These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.”

Perhaps it’s time to improve those academic standards? I know of a test that has quite the rigorous reading passages: https://t.co/MPs1bmZ8wE

[Karen Vaites @karenvaites]

“We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.”

Another college professor adds to the chorus of concern about student capacity.

In @chronicle:

“Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.”