Hi! It’s Lily and Erica with the national desk, writing to you as we hit the tail end of spring break season — one that featured chaos at some American airports. If you were traveling, we hope you made it home safe.

Today’s big story is a look at the conservative-backed Classic Learning Test, or the CLT, an acronym you might be hearing in the same breath as “SAT” and “ACT.” Stick around, too, for details around the president’s calls for deep cuts to education programs, and a nonprofit’s strategy to reach young people around the risks of owning a gun. 

More schools are now accepting a third standardized test — the Classic Learning Test, backed by conservatives — for college admission, in addition to the widely accepted SAT and ACT. 

The movement to make the Classic Learning Test, or the CLT, a standard in college admissions is gaining traction. Indiana’s governor signed a bill in March requiring state colleges and universities weigh CLT scores in the way they would for the ACT or SAT. The state also allows high schools to use the test to earn points under the state accountability system.

Backers of the test claim the two-hour, 120-question test rooted in passages from Western writers counters an education system that overwhelmingly favors progressive ideals.

They argue the test is appropriate in a school choice environment that includes many classically oriented charter and private schools, as well as homeschool families that rely on a classical curriculum.

On its website, the testing company touts over 300 institutions that accept CLT scores — many appear to have a Christian affiliation. But it’s also catching on in larger universities. In 2023, Florida became the first state to widely accept the CLT for college admissions. More recently, the University of North Carolina system adopted the CLT as an accepted exam.

But the CLT’s critics say the exam skews history to a narrow perspective, and have raised concerns about score comparisons with the more mainstream SAT, ACT, and AP exams.

Read the full story here.

President Donald Trump’s proposed budget again calls for deep cuts to many education programs. The budget released last week would zero out spending on educator professional development, homeless student services, English learner supports, and more.

It also re-ups a proposal to consolidate many of these federal programs into a single block grant to states worth about $2 billion. That’s less than half as much as the federal government currently spends on the targeted programs.

All told, the cuts add up to $8.5 billion or a 3% cut in federal education spending, according to K-12 Dive.

But a very similar proposal didn’t fly with Congress last year. On a bipartisan basis, lawmakers rejected the idea of block-granting education spending, and they kept funding level for most programs.

There’s little reason to think this year will be different. 

“We’re dealing with the same Congress, the same majorities in the House and Senate we were dealing with for the FY2026 negotiations process,” Kelly Christiansen, legislative director for the Bruman Group, an education law firm, told Education Week. 

The proposed budget calls for maintaining Title I funding for schools serving high numbers of students in poverty at current levels, and a slight increase in special education funding.

Beyond education, the budget calls for cuts to a wide range of domestic programs that help low-income families, cuts that if they became reality, would likely have spillover effects for students and schools. Trump said “military protection” is a bigger budget priority than domestic programs, including child care.

That’s the proportion of victims of fatal and non-fatal shootings in Chicago who were 19 years old or younger. A nonprofit in Chicago is trying to prevent that kind of pervasive youth gun violence by paying teens to attend a weeklong program about the risks of gun ownership. The nonprofit, Project Unloaded, may change some minds: representatives with the organization said it saw a 30% drop in participants interested in owning a gun.

That was science education researcher Brian Donovan speaking to STAT. Donovan led a team that developed a new high school genetics curriculum and designed rigorous studies to assess its impact on students’ racial attitudes. A randomized controlled study involving more than 16,000 students in 33 states was interrupted when the National Science Foundation abruptly canceled millions of dollars in grants last year. 

Donovan won the Excellence in Education Award from the Genetics Society of America in February. But the NSF cuts marked the end of Donovan’s research career, because he worked in a “soft money” position funded entirely by grants. He’s applying to nursing school, though he hopes others carry the work forward.