Dear Hill Country Families,

If you have a student in grades 3rd-10th at Hill Country, you are likely well aware that we have chosen to partner with Classic Learning Test (CLT) for our Standardized testing. In fact, many of your students were tested this week.

I want to share a few reasons why I believe this is a great move for our school and share a podcast I was invited to participate in with CLT earlier this month. 

These are the main reasons I believe the CLT is the best means of assessing Hill Country Christian School Students:

1. The CLT more closely aligns with our school’s mission and curriculum than other standardized tests do, both in the content we cover and in the worldview from which we teach all our courses.
   
2. The data we can glean from CLT is usable and immediately helpful to our program. While some may view standardized tests as primarily student-focused, as a school administrator, I mainly view them from the perspective of the data we can get about our program. Said another way, we can see how we are doing as a school by watching how our students are performing on standardized tests. 
   
3. It allows us to compare ourselves with like-minded schools. While I always loved it when, in previous schools, we would take standardized tests that would show our school performing in the 90% range, I had to remind myself that these tests were pulling from a very wide range of students and schools. CLT allows us to compare ourselves with schools that have similar curriculum and similar values. This keeps us from being insular or being tempted to evaluate ourselves merely by our neighbors down the street. Now we can compare ourselves with numerous classical Christian schools across the country.

If you are a podcast listener, you may find this episode enjoyable. I speak partially about CLT, but more broadly about my love of classical education. For any of you brave enough to listen, I’d love feedback!

Have a great weekend,

Eric DeVries, Head of School