CLT Scores State Policy Victories Nationwide | Michael Torres

On this episode of Anchored, Jeremy is joined by CLT Director of Legislative Strategy Michael Torres. The two discuss the recent policy victories for CLT and the classical renewal movement in states such as Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. They unpack the surprising and predictable responses from politicians and SAT and ACT lobbyists. Finally, they dive into the characteristics of states that are excited about adopting the CLT into their college admissions processes. 

Transcript

 Jeremy Tate (00:01.705)
Welcome back to the Anchor podcast. We have not done this in some time. We have an internal guest today, director of policy here at the Classic Learning Test, Michael Torres, following Florida, Governor DeSantis. Now we've got Oklahoma, Arkansas, some big wins in Texas, and things moving rapidly in a number of other states as well. Michael, you've been killing it on the policy side, kind of knocking down barriers.

It has been such a gift to have you at CLT the past couple of years and thanks for coming on the podcast.

Michael (00:35.042)
Thanks so much, Jeremy. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you and to be on the podcast. You have some great people on here. So it's an honor to be here.

Jeremy Tate (00:43.323)
Now, Michael, tell us a little bit about your educational journey. When you think back to school as a young boy, did you love it, hate it? What was that like for you?

Michael (00:51.276)
Well, I think I might have had a more traditional education background compared to a lot of people who've been on the podcast. I didn't find classical education until I went to graduate school at St. John's College when I was about 30, 31 years old. But to kind of answer that question, I think I might need to rewind a little bit. My grandfather was an immigrant from Mexico. He was abandoned at the border by his mother.

with his eight siblings and had to walk from the border to Fresno, California, where he knew he had family. They slept under propane tanks. They slept under cars. He did street boxing to make money on his way up. And that story really defined our family's approach to education and work and the American dream over the generations. He ended up getting his citizenship while serving in the army.

Jeremy Tate (01:23.738)
Unreal.

Jeremy Tate (01:46.875)
Mm-hmm.

Michael (01:46.964)
Afterwards, he worked for Lockheed building helicopters, and then he started his own business as a handyman in the San Fernando Valley in California and worked his butt off really to make his American dream happy. And then he, he retired on top of a mountain in California. And that work ethic went to my father who started his own construction company. And I worked for him throughout high school and college every summer, I would be hanging drywall and doing steel stud framing and

Jeremy Tate (02:02.322)
Hmm.

Michael (02:15.562)
And it was my presumption that I would take over his business and keep doing what he was doing. I was making good money. I enjoyed the work. Education was something I just kind of had to do. But when I got to the end of high school, my father told me, no, have no choice. You're going to college. And I said, okay. So I took the SAT. I went to college, got into a couple of places and went. I didn't know why I was there exactly. I just did it because I was told to.

So I started out as a business major, but hated accounting. Didn't really know why, like didn't jive with the education I was receiving. I ended up enjoying a couple of politics classes. So I became a political science major, floated through that, got to the end of college and didn't know what to do with it. My dad didn't want me to come back to work for him. He told me that I needed to not be in his line of work. So.

Jeremy Tate (02:44.061)
Yeah.

Michael (03:10.806)
I took the LSAT, that was the next thing, the next test to do and went to law school for a year. The best thing about law school is I met my wife in law school in our first year. Yeah, we always tell each other that it was the most expensive way to go on a first date. But it was great. We went through the first year and because of her really we got to talking, we ended up deciding to leave law school was not.

Jeremy Tate (03:21.021)
That's a big win.

Michael (03:38.178)
what we had envisioned for ourselves. were watching a lot of friends struggling, getting out of law school in a difficult environment. And it wasn't exactly my future as I saw it. So instead I went to join the Navy and became an officer in the Navy and got myself a career so I could marry her. And at that point I figured I was done. I checked the boxes, the education boxes, had a job. I was good, but it wasn't until my second deployment

Jeremy Tate (03:45.223)
Mm.

Michael (04:07.744)
that I ended up reading a couple books while we were sitting off the coast of Libya on the USS Wasp for 120 days straight. I ended up reading Crime and Punishment and The Closing of the American Mind. And the combination of those, thought, my goodness, there's this whole world of literature and education that I had no idea about. So when I actually got out of the Navy, my wife got in a couple of years later as a nurse and got assigned to Walter Reed Hospital in Maryland.

Jeremy Tate (04:20.385)
away

Michael (04:37.05)
And I took that as an opportunity to apply to St. John's. And so after a long winding road, I ended up finding the classics in the liberal arts and just absolutely loved it.

Jeremy Tate (04:46.237)
This is an incredible story. I'm picturing you. You're in the middle of where to do the Persian Gulf.

Michael (04:53.356)
We were off the coast of Libya, North Africa. We were supposed to go to the Middle East, but then ISIS started taking over Libya and we got orders to go over there. We parked about 12 miles off the coast and started launching Harriers to bomb ISIS and we sat there for four months straight doing that.

Jeremy Tate (05:09.181)
And you're in the bunk, I'm picturing you in the bunk reading, The Closing of the American Mind and Crime and Punishment.

Michael (05:17.694)
Yeah, I had a few others that I brought with me. was like, hey, I have this opportunity. I'm sitting here on this boat for months. Might as well read some things that I figured I should read. And it was those two.

Jeremy Tate (05:22.491)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (05:29.425)
That's incredible. How did you know about St. John's?

Michael (05:33.432)
I'd come across it on the internet a couple of times, thought it was an interesting, unique school. When I was in college, there was like a flash in the pan of my desire for a classic approach to education. I convinced a professor of mine with a fellow student, another friend of mine, to create an honors political theory class. And we sat around in a circle and went over texts just like at St. John's, but we were completely inept at it. We had no idea what we were doing. I didn't know how to read a whole text like

contend with it in an intelligent fashion. But it was fun, it was interesting, and when I found St. John's online, thought, that's kind cool. Maybe I should keep that in mind.

Jeremy Tate (06:14.429)
Fascinating St. John's you did five of the six disciplines. This is a graduate program in kind of Western classics. Is that right?

Michael (06:22.03)
Yeah, exactly. They go through different subject matter. have literature, political, politics and philosophy, mathematics and science and history. And you can pick which of the ones you want to complete. And you have to complete at least four of them, I believe, to finish the graduate institute.

Jeremy Tate (06:37.967)
Okay, and then tell me about St. John's, dear friends of ours, right here in Annapolis, beautiful school, super formative time, what were a couple of the works that impacted you the most?

Michael (06:48.822)
Another Dostoevsky book, The Brothers Karamazov was amazing. I really enjoyed that. I had a preceptorial for that, meaning we solely studied that book for the entire semester in one of our classes. That was very fun. Also had a great time reading Plato's Republic for the first time. I'd never encountered it before. It was a book that I, you you hear about, but it never came up once in high school or college, even though I studied political science. And to be able to go back and read that.

Jeremy Tate (06:53.08)
huh.

Jeremy Tate (07:00.87)
Okay.

Jeremy Tate (07:10.588)
Hmm.

Michael (07:18.178)
was amazing. Also, The Histories by Herodotus was an extremely fun book to go through. So being able to approach those and read those books with a group of people who also loved them together, sitting around the wooden table, was an extremely formative experience. It happened during COVID when I was there. So a little bit of it was over Zoom, but it was extremely fun.

Jeremy Tate (07:23.514)
Okay.

Jeremy Tate (07:31.613)
Mm.

Michael (07:41.228)
very, very grateful that St. John's exists, that they persisted through COVID and that they have the Graduate Institute for students like me who find them late in life.

Jeremy Tate (07:51.119)
Okay, and then from St. John's into the policy world.

Michael (07:54.582)
I actually started working in policy right after I got out of the Navy back in 2018. I got out and my wife got into nursing school in Philadelphia. So we moved to Pennsylvania and this group called the Commonwealth Foundation, which is a think tank based in Harrisburg, had a job opening to be a communications person on their staff. So I started working there, working on education policy, tax policy.

other regulatory things and absolutely fell in love with the education work they were doing. They were primarily focused on school choice along with other things having to do with budget and how the public education system structured in Pennsylvania. So that's where I started out, really got to learn the ropes of how things work in an extremely contentious state. As you might have imagined, Pennsylvania is a difficult place to work in sometimes.

Jeremy Tate (08:44.935)
Sure. Well, you you've been an amazing addition to the team here at CLT. And I think, you know, have done more than all of the ACT and College Board lobbyists combined have been able to accomplish. despite their best efforts, huge ones again in Oklahoma and Texas and Arkansas, it's been incredible. You know, and I think Florida gave gave us kind of a model for how we could kind of scale CLT nationwide. And I think with that.

sometimes being a beachhead for classical education itself, which is super exciting. Tell us just a little bit about the winds this past spring around the country.

Michael (09:25.976)
Certainly. So we were trying to launch off of Florida. It was such a great example. Governor DeSantis, Commissioner Manny Diaz, and others in Florida who really cared about ensuring that students had another option in terms of what assessments they could take for various things, whether it's graduation, qualifying for dual enrollment in colleges, getting scholarships to college, participating in the school choice programs. They went across the board and included us as an option.

alongside the test that had previously had monopoly over those arenas. So we tried to structure a way to find states where there were those particular opportunities or a particular opening with lawmakers to at least work on one or two of those issues. You're not gonna find many Governor DeSantis is everywhere who wanna just do everything at once. He's very much a let's go big or go home kind of guy. In Arkansas, actually, we ended up replicating a lot of what happened thanks to

Jeremy Tate (10:16.298)
huh.

Michael (10:23.938)
Governor Sanders there, she included us in the Arkansas Access Bill, which is a major higher education reform bill. They basically took a whole bunch of their higher education policies, scrapped it and replaced it with a new approach. Everything from dual enrollment and advanced courses for high school students to the entrance exams they could use, such as CLT, to earn scholarships or admissions to the universities there.

Jeremy Tate (10:31.453)
Hmm.

Jeremy Tate (10:47.111)
Mm-hmm.

Michael (10:51.594)
And then subsequent to that, they passed SB 183, which allows public high school students to choose between either of the three tests, the CLT 10, the PSAT or pre ACT in ninth or 10th grade, or the college entrance exams in 11th 12th grade. it were previously it was only ACT allowed. Now all three companies can compete and the students can choose which one fits their needs best. So that was a very close model to what happened in

Jeremy Tate (11:00.925)
Thanks.

Michael (11:21.802)
in Florida, in Arkansas. In Oklahoma, we weren't able to go that big, but it was pretty big still. We worked with some really great friends in Oklahoma who were very interested in helping us kind of work on the ACT monopoly that was established in state law there as well. Big shout out to the Catholic Conference in Oklahoma. They were very interested in bringing this.

Jeremy Tate (11:45.787)
Deacon, Deacon Garlic, we love you. Thank you.

Michael (11:49.47)
and Brett, who heads the Catholic Conference, was a very big help in introducing us to the concept of CLT and helping me inform lawmakers there of what our test is about and what our company does. And what we were able to do there is work with both of the education chairman, chairman and chairwoman in the House, who ended up sponsoring our bill, is HB 1096. And what we did was we found every place that ACT had an established monopoly in state law.

Jeremy Tate (11:52.753)
That's early? Yeah.

Michael (12:17.248)
over the decades they've gone through and their name was just put into law everywhere, which is not something you see in other portions of policy. You don't see Lockheed Martin or Boeing in international statute. Usually the statute says, go forth Department of Defense and build a bomber. And then they contract.

Jeremy Tate (12:26.813)
Sure, yeah.

Sure.

Jeremy Tate (12:35.805)
So why is that in so many states that that's the case as well where you've got two companies, mean, ACD is a for-profit company, written into statute. How did that happen?

Michael (12:48.6)
Well, because they are standardized, it gives the companies the allure of being the only option. We have to create a standard that our students are held to, I think. And so they go into each state and then each state becomes an ACT state or an SAT state. And that's the one standard. And for some reason, when it comes to testing and that sort of academic measurement, people might relate it a little bit to a state test.

Jeremy Tate (12:58.864)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Tate (13:09.455)
Mm-hmm.

Michael (13:16.022)
Oftentimes when you talk to people about this, think the SAT or ACT are part of government operations, not an independent company.

Jeremy Tate (13:21.767)
Totally, In fact, when we started CLT, a number of people said, it's an interesting idea, but I think it's illegal. I heard that a lot.

Michael (13:29.589)
Exactly. Yeah, that's a very common sentiment. And it's one I've encountered talking with lawmakers. They think, well, we're an ACT state. It's just built into the system. I have to explain to them, you're not at ACT isn't part of your state government. It's not part of the Department of Education in your state. It's a private company. And you've written this private company into your state law. You didn't per se, but it happened in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s over the years. They lobbied.

Jeremy Tate (13:47.933)
Yeah.

Michael (13:56.31)
lawmakers to say, hey, you should have a standard for graduating students or a score set for them earning state funded scholarships. And instead of saying in state law, a student should get in the 80th percentile on a college entrance exam to earn a state funded scholarship, they'll say a student should earn an ACT score, an SAT score of X, Y, and Z. And that's a really unfortunate way to go about things because

Jeremy Tate (14:20.658)
Hmm.

Michael (14:24.462)
Those tests change quite often. The scores drift over time, they reformat it. So having that written into law makes it inevitably an old, it gets old very quickly and references something that is wrong, but it's also unfair because it eliminates the ability for free and fair competition and made it so that CLT can go about a big process.

Jeremy Tate (14:27.09)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (14:46.189)
Is the smoke screen starting to clear? mean, at the end of the day, these are companies, companies with an impoverished vision for education that are just selling tests, right? But there's been this kind of smoke screen that it's so much more than that. Are folks starting to kind of see through that now?

Michael (15:05.87)
To a certain extent, yes, but it's sort of in certain circles of the education world. A lot of the education reform movement nowadays is focused on things like school choice and science of reading, literacy, things like that. And where the standardized assessment conversation has been mostly focused is on test optional policies. That's been the biggest thing. So a lot of people are thinking, hey, we should get rid of these test optional policies and bring the SAT and ACT back.

So the conversation has been less about why are these tests changing and what could be better about them and more about should they be used or not, unfortunately. But we're trying to change that. And I think we're finding some success in doing so. For instance, I talked to dozens and dozens and dozens of lawmakers in Texas over the last session and basically to educate them on one, what the CLT is and two, what had changed with the SAT, which I think had flabbergasted a lot of them.

Jeremy Tate (15:35.335)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Tate (16:04.253)
Yeah.

Michael (16:04.45)
to know that one, that the tests change at all, and two, what the changes were. And so that has really, really instigated a lot more thinking on their part about why they're making the policies they're making.

Jeremy Tate (16:10.311)
Sure.

Jeremy Tate (16:18.673)
We talked a little bit about Oklahoma, a little bit more about Arkansas. Tell us about Texas. There's a few different bills in Texas.

Michael (16:27.244)
Yes, so we had a few different options at the beginning of the session that we were working on with lawmakers. And as things got moving, as you know, Texas is a big state, a lot happened in the education world in Texas this session. They ended up passing the nation's biggest school choice bill. And we were working on the behind the scenes amidst all that, I'll just say chaos. was a lot of work going on in the education world.

And we ended up honing in on one particular policy area, which was the admissions statute for public institutions of higher education. They have one of what I think was the most unfortunate version of public policy for admissions. They had instituted an automatic admissions policy that specified the SAT and ACT and specific scores.

Jeremy Tate (16:59.804)
Mm-hmm.

Michael (17:19.202)
that had led to them referencing an SAT score that no longer exists. They had the old version of the SAT at 2400, that's since changed. the student had to earn a score on a test that didn't exist to earn automatic admissions to the University of Texas, but everyone was just kind of going with it. So we brought this up to them and said, you should alter this. You have a higher education coordinating board there. They should be able to...

Jeremy Tate (17:26.973)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (17:31.933)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (17:36.495)
huh.

Michael (17:45.154)
the tests that are used for this automatic admissions process that Texas uses and prove the scores because they seem to change, especially with the ACT and SAT. So we were successful in that, worked with a couple of great lawmakers, Senator Middleton and Representative Leo Wilson and got it to the governor's desk. So the SAT and ACT duopoly in Texas for public institutions is no more. It's now with Governor Abbott and the higher education coordinating.

to choose which tests to use.

Jeremy Tate (18:17.787)
Michael, have you been surprised by the efforts of the College Board of ACT to stop CLT? Was this expected? Has it been coming on much stronger than previous year?

Michael (18:33.464)
There's some surprises and some things that are not surprising. In some states, we've tried to work in the extent of their longstanding relationships. These are big companies. The College Board makes over a billion dollars a year, and they spend well over a million dollars a year just on lobbying. That's not counting the amount they spend on other things to get their name out there in the policy world.

And so they have a lot of relationships with people in state government for a long time. So you get there and talk to folks and they're like, well, I know them and I'm going to stay loyal to them. And so that's not surprising. And we have a road ahead of us to convince folks in certain states that this is not the right position to be in and that we're coming, whether they like it or not, the CLT is coming. So that wasn't surprising. What I think was surprising is the extent to which

Jeremy Tate (19:16.839)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (19:24.355)
into which each of us from the public is

Michael (19:24.714)
each of those companies were willing to lobby against legislation that helped one of them. So they were lobbying against themselves just to try and keep us out. That happened in Oklahoma. We were adding the SAT and the CLT in several portions of state law, but the college board still lobbied against it. So they would prefer to have had an ACT monopoly in Oklahoma without the SAT being able to

Jeremy Tate (19:30.897)
Hmm.

Jeremy Tate (19:37.034)
Jeremy Tate (19:51.792)
Incredible.

Michael (19:52.622)
just because they're afraid of us being able to come in and compete. And I understand that because once we were allowed to compete in Florida, it exploded. The desire students used us exploded. And so there's a cynical nature to this lobbying effort that was a little surprising to me, but now we know that that is where they're willing to go.

Jeremy Tate (19:57.33)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (20:01.735)
Sure. Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (20:16.029)
Louisiana, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, Georgia, any other states you're thinking about that you're excited about.

Michael (20:26.24)
Right now, Louisiana and Ohio are top of mind. We are working on a bill to be added to the TOPS Scholarship Program. It's one of the biggest state-funded scholarship programs. Louisiana, think, was the...

Jeremy Tate (20:37.045)
I don't think I knew anyone at LSU that was not on TOPS except me because I came from Maryland and I was a... But everybody was on TOPS. In-state and it was a pretty low cutoff back then at least. You got a 20 on the ACT and you're going for free to LSU.

Michael (20:40.002)
Really? because you can get it.

Michael (20:55.15)
Mm hmm. And we honestly weren't thinking about Louisiana this session. It didn't seem as though that was a place where education reform at the higher education level was going to be taken up. And there was more budget issues in Louisiana. So we thought maybe we're going to leave that till next year. But then all of sudden, sessions started and there were several bills proposed to expand access to tops. And so we spoke with some lawmakers a few months ago or a couple of months ago and saw

basically asked if they would be interested in including CLT and several were. They're very, very interested as seeing this as an opportunity to keep more Louisiana students in state. And so now we're working on a bill that's almost done. It's in the Senate now. We've got a couple more hills to

Jeremy Tate (21:40.071)
I'm picking up a theme on this. mean, so many of the states that are stepping up as leaders, mean, Louisiana, Cade Brumley, maybe the best superintendent, certainly one of the very best superintendents in the country. Florida has kind of been ground zero for school choice. Texas, it seems like states that are really serious about being leaders in the renewal of education are the states that CLT is winning in.

I'm wondering, you know, if you see this, what are you projecting? What are you hoping in three, five years? Are the rest of the states looking at Texas and Florida and?

Michael (22:21.282)
Yes, a lot of states look at Florida and Texas. What they do, a lot of states will pay attention to. But to answer the other question also, yes, the states that are most interested in making positive changes for education are also the places where we're finding a lot of people interested in adding CLT as an option for students in key areas. Another, to go back to Texas, they instituted something called Blue Bonnet Curriculum. They created this new system for

It's called high quality instructional materials for public school students. And Blue Bonnet is part of what they offer now. It's a classical curriculum that students in public schools can now pull from for part of their education and teachers can use it at will. And so that's another version of the changes that states like Texas are making. They're saying, hey, we have this long standing version of curriculum that public schools use. We're gonna open it up. We're gonna change things. Teachers can now pull in classical curriculum into public schools.

Jeremy Tate (22:55.323)
Mm-hmm.

Michael (23:20.434)
and we're going to allow school choice. And they have a very large charter school movement in the state. And now they're working to implement CLT as a new option for college admissions exams. We're very excited to work with the Abbott administration on that there. So there's a lot of change happening in Texas. There's other states where there's not a lot of change. Usually the biggest change that happens in some states is they increase the budget for public schools. Nothing else changes.

Jeremy Tate (23:20.615)
Well, yeah.

Michael (23:45.582)
In those sorts of places, you're not going to see lot of interest in adding CLT because we represent something new and different. And there's a sort of, um, not in a political sense, but a conservative nature to education in a lot of places. And one I'll pick on in particular would be like in Illinois. In Illinois, that's a place where the only big change you're going to see in education year to year is the budget of the public school system. Very little else is going to change there. They're very conservative in how they approach education. They like it the way it is.

Jeremy Tate (24:03.197)
Mm-hmm.

Michael (24:14.85)
So it's gonna be difficult for us to go and say, you need to drastically change the assessments that you're allowing for students to get into college or third through eighth grade assessments like the one we provide because it's gonna cause them a little bit of concern. They're not used to that sort of change.

Jeremy Tate (24:21.007)
or yeah.

Jeremy Tate (24:31.365)
Given an equal playing field, which is what you're creating for us at CLT, knocking down barriers, making an equal playing field, we're seeing that given a chance to compete, the market, students, schools prefer CLT in a big way. In fact, ACT's top person in Florida, Wes Gentry, is now at the classic learning test.

Michael (24:53.688)
Wes is the best. I love Wes.

Jeremy Tate (24:55.067)
Wes is the best, right? Who, know, classically homeschools, you know, his own kiddos. Why do you think that is?

Michael (25:05.73)
That is a great question. And I get versions of that question from lawmakers from time to time. And it's hard to nail it down to one particular reason. It probably has to do with the family and the student and the school. So in Florida, there's various ways students are using us. One of the biggest is to graduate from high school. Another one is to participate in the school choice program, whether they're homeschooled or they're going to a private school. And so you've got very different

families, students, different backgrounds and locations of why students would choose CLT over one of the other exams. So it's hard to pick, but one thought I've always had is we have a very different approach to test prep. The other tests, for instance, we had a conversation with the Department of Education in Florida. Students will be put in SAT test prep from the time they're in like seventh or eighth grade. It's like a military.

Jeremy Tate (25:48.978)
Hmm.

Michael (26:00.888)
program that the parents will institute on their child and they will be drilled into SAT test prep for years and years and years. And a lot of families don't want to have to go through that or compete with those, you know, maniacal version of college entrance exam preparation. And so offering a fresh approach to testing that where everyone's kind of on a little bit more of an equal playing field where if you get a good education, you're going to do well in our test.

Jeremy Tate (26:27.047)
Yeah

Michael (26:29.738)
not getting a good education, you're probably not going to do well in our test. It's a little bit more straightforward.

Jeremy Tate (26:33.349)
I think that's the reason why I was looking on Instagram at this ACT commercial, like an Instagram reel or something. And it was somebody trying to sell the ACT as a weatherman and saying, I get it wrong a lot and you can get it wrong a lot.

and still do great on the ACT. And that's the whole value prop. Whereas I think students like this idea of like, come grapple with the greatest minds in the history of Western thought. And they're challenged by that. I think we've so underestimated what young people are capable of. And for us at ACT, I think it's been kind of this race to the bottom, right? Where...

Michael (27:14.968)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Tate (27:21.149)
know, whichever test is a little bit easier is going to be the easier way to.

get scholarships to access admissions. And so over time, they've kind of been dumbed down. think students like the challenge often, as well, taking a test that is going to put them in front of something that's truly meaningful is actually worthy of their time and attention. Michael, we've kind of already asked, or you kind of already said, we usually end the Anchor podcast talking about the books that have been most formative. You mentioned your time reading Brothers K at St. John's and in the

Michael (27:31.342)
you

Jeremy Tate (27:54.783)
reading Crime and Punishment and Closing the American Mind. If you had to pick just one though for our audience, what would that be?

Michael (28:04.674)
Well, that's kind of difficult. Maybe I'll throw a little bit of a curve ball and go outside the classics because I've mentioned a few, but another book, it's actually right behind me, that I read recently that was extremely inspiring to me is Grant, about Ulysses S. Grant. It's a biography of him that I had never encountered before. So if you want to go outside the Dostoevsky or the Herodotus or something like that and read something extremely interesting, his story is amazing. I had no idea how impoverished he was.

He got married to a woman who lived in Missouri and he was a farmer competing with the slave-owning farms nearby. He ended up making money selling firewood in the nearby town and was completely destitute just a couple years before he became a general in the United States. So his story was inspiring and very, very interesting and one that I hope more people should know about.

Jeremy Tate (28:49.923)
Incredible.

Jeremy Tate (28:57.101)
Grant, fantastic. Again, we're here with Michael Torres, the Director of Policy here at the Classic Learning Test. Michael, again, what a gift you've been to CLT. Very grateful for everything that you've done. And you got to come back again after next session and give us the updates.

Michael (29:12.856)
Look forward to it.