CLT to Launch AP Alternative | Sarah Novlan

On this episode of Anchored, Jeremy is joined by Sarah Novlan, Chief Academic Officer at Hill Country Christian School. They announce CLT Enduring Courses as a new alternative to AP curriculum, launching in the 2026–27 academic year. The two examine how the AP classes often contradict a classical curriculum in both rigor and content. They also explore why classical schools are eager for changes in the college prep–course landscape, and the telos that sets CLT apart. 

Transcript

Jeremy Tate (00:01.808)
Folks, welcome back to the Anchor Podcast here today with Chief.

Jeremy Tate (00:09.626)
near Austin, Texas. Sarah, thrilled to have you on the podcast and thrilled to kick it off with a story that I think is going to become a big turning point in kind of CLT history as time goes by. past Austin, this past April, we were in Austin and there you took a day to come and help us testify a bill in Texas regarding CLT. We got delayed. We ended up at a coffee shop and there were three or four of us there.

And you kind of presented a challenge that CLT needed to take on AP. And this had been, I think, looming since the very beginning of launching CLT in 2015. And in many ways, starting CLT was as much fire by seeing the influence of AP as SAT. In fact, I tell this story pretty frequently of these sweet Dominican sisters at this school.

that I was working at that wanted to introduce some great new classes, Intro to Philosophy, Intro to Christian Apologetics, and students didn't sign up. And the reason they didn't sign up was because it wasn't any AP points. So it was kind of this first moment for me in realizing, wow, College Board is really influential in a way that's intentioned with a lot of great Christian schools, Catholic schools, classical charter schools.

But it seemed like mission impossible. So then we worked together and you present this challenge. within an hour, I was pretty much convinced. And you had such passion for this. And now, we've been in this now three or four months, enduring courses, tons of enthusiasm. That is all a very long introduction. Sarah Noveland, welcome to the Anchor Podcast. Super thrilled to have you with us today.

Sarah Novlan (01:40.844)
next.

Sarah Novlan (01:59.352)
Jeremy, thank you for having me.

Jeremy Tate (02:02.126)
Awesome. So my first question is this, is you have such a passion for this vision for education. Where does that come from? Were you homeschooled growing up? Did you receive a classical education or did you discover it along the way like so many others?

Sarah Novlan (02:18.348)
Yeah, I think I'm like so many others in this movement and that I discovered it along the way. I like to quote Shakespeare on this, that the past is prologue. And so everything that I've had in my background has led up to this moment. But I grew up with a little bit of everything in my K-12. I was public school for a little bit. I did get to be homeschooled for a few short years.

where my mom really let me lean into reading and writing, my love of literature. I had a few years at a private school and then ended back up at a public school before going to the University of Texas and majoring in English and education. And, you know, I look back at my years as homeschool as maybe the closest to classically, being classically educated, but even then, you my mom was

had been a public school teacher before that. And when I went to the University of Texas, that was kind of the first inkling that I had that maybe education, that there was something a bit amiss. And at that time I had no idea. I mean, the University of Texas, how amiss. Well, what happened was, here I was, this bright-eyed, naive college student.

Jeremy Tate (03:32.902)
Yes, okay. No idea how I missed.

Sarah Novlan (03:43.094)
And I was so excited about being an English major because finally I was going to get to take all of the classes that I wanted to in English. And I wanted to take Shakespeare's tragedies, comedies, histories, and being told by my guidance counselor, I'm sorry, you can pick one book, like one author, one class from the Western canon. like not just can you only take one Shakespeare class, but if you want to pick Dante or Chaucer, like that's it. And you need to take

Jeremy Tate (03:50.372)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (04:11.279)
One.

Sarah Novlan (04:12.96)
Linguistics, Politics and Linguistics and all of these other classes that I didn't really want to take. And I think at the time in retrospect, I really was hoping for a great books program, but I just didn't know that that existed.

Jeremy Tate (04:32.272)
Well, now was it was it like full deconstruction mode? I mean, did you feel like they were trying to mow down the tradition and.

Sarah Novlan (04:38.862)
that's a great question. I, I, I will say I had a few professors who, I mean, they introduced me to Tolstoy and Flannery O'Connor and, some professors who really did teach me to write. But in terms of my English teacher training, I, I think back, like, if I can go sit in those classes now and have conversations with those professors,

It was, and I will say too, I've had the opportunity to kind of mentor some of my former students who have gone through that similar program at UT. And now it is, now it definitely, there is very little in that what I would recommend to anybody going into studying English or education. But it prepared me for where I am now and it's, I met my husband at UT, so I can't have any regrets.

Jeremy Tate (05:15.383)
Okay.

Jeremy Tate (05:35.269)
Yeah. Well, I do think, though, Sarah, that I'm hopeful that the tide is finally turning and that, you know, these poor professors, so many of them.

Sarah Novlan (05:35.98)
you

Jeremy Tate (05:44.529)
They're hiding that they actually love Shakespeare and that they love the tradition. But there's such a tidal wave coming that's starting outside of the university. And this is what I think is so amazing about this movement. And as I've tried to my head around this, this might be the first time that the university is being reformed by all of these forces outside of it.

Sarah Novlan (06:05.997)
Yes.

Jeremy Tate (06:06.118)
which I think is really, really cool. Okay, so tell us about your journey then from University of Texas to Hill Country Christian School and into this role as academic dean now.

Sarah Novlan (06:16.494)
Yeah. Um, so from there, I, uh, took a short detour to South America and then, um, ended up in for another podcast, um, and ended up, uh, teaching in Dallas, the Dallas area and getting my masters at SMU. And then, um, ended up at Hill country starting in 2016. And that's really where I began to learn about explore classical education. Um, and just really fell in love with it. It was.

Jeremy Tate (06:23.598)
Or D2 or just, yeah.

Sarah Novlan (06:46.474)
Even teaching in Christian education, I found that in classical education, there's such a sense of renewal and restoration for teachers. It really helped me, think, get an understanding, more of a deeper understanding and love for literature, for why we teach literature. And from there, I ended up as the English Rhetoric Chair and then started my doctorate at ACU.

So I'm about to finish my dissertation and hopefully in December. And then in 2022 transition to chief academic officer.

Jeremy Tate (07:26.254)
Okay, and then you made this, or you shared this story with me before, and I'd for folks to hear it because I love CLT. Your story kind of discovering CLT in the role of a chief academic officer, I felt was so great because it just validated the reason we started CLT in the first place.

Sarah Novlan (07:46.222)
Yes, yeah. So when I started as chief academic officer, our head of school at the time wanted me to really do an audit of what is academics at Hill Country look like? What does that constitute? What are our pillars of academics? And so I went about constructing what I'd call an academic dashboard that the pillars of our academics would be curriculum, faculty, professional development.

the portrait of a graduate, and one of those pillars was testing. And when I looked at what was constituting our pillars under testing, or the pillar of testing, it was the most out of alignment for us. It was this one-off that we were complying with and getting this data. But as administrators, the question was, what are we doing with this data? Are we actually measuring what matters?

Jeremy Tate (08:41.083)
Mm.

Sarah Novlan (08:41.674)
it just seemed like a force fit. And that is when we came across CLT and it just, the more I dug into it, the more I asked questions, the more I couldn't believe what a perfect fit it was for us as a classical school, not only in terms of the content, but really just who CLT is as a company. And then also, I think the role that you guys are playing in

the broader marketplace for schools, for classical schools and beyond that. And so we switched over to CLT and it was, what was interesting about that was it didn't just bring the pillar of testing into alignment. It helped us align our other pillars in other meaningful ways.

Jeremy Tate (09:29.338)
Mmm.

Jeremy Tate (09:33.467)
That means the world and what we've seen time and time again is that we say this way that CLT adoption is never alone. It never happens in a silo and that schools will often say, especially if it's a school that's not like self-consciously classical, they'll say, we're gonna be doing more philosophy, we're gonna be doing more foundational texts, primary sources, we're gonna be getting rid of the calculator in math so much or such a dependence on it as well. mean, it really does have, in a way that we believe

is allows the schools to be more fully who they set out to be in the first place.

Sarah Novlan (10:07.948)
Yeah. And I mean, that experience and just working with CLT from customer service side, and then also having our teachers administer the test, I was such a huge CLT fan that when we met in Austin and when I began to come up against this problem that we can talk about with AP, in my mind, CLT is poised as the perfect organization to take on.

this tremendous endeavor.

Jeremy Tate (10:39.142)
So one of the things we're doing in this podcast that I'm excited about is making a kind of a big announcement that's exciting. I told you kind of joking, but not really in awesome as we were having this conversation, because I was thinking, this is a lot. I don't know how to navigate this. Taking on AP always seemed like mission impossible. You had a whole framework for how this could be done. So I kind of said, all right, we'll take on AP if you'll come over to CLT and help us do it.

Sarah Novlan (10:47.95)
Thank

Jeremy Tate (11:04.447)
And it took a while to make that happen, but you're going to be joining us full time this January, which is amazing. We are all so excited here.

Sarah Novlan (11:12.354)
Thank you. I am also very excited. It seems incredible to get to be joining such a talented and amazing team. So I'm also excited.

Jeremy Tate (11:22.93)
So tell us about the first few months though, because you've been, you know, during the summer you had the lighter schedule of course at Hill Country Christian and you've been in conversations now with probably 40, 50 schools and many universities as well. And we've learned so much, but give us the update. we're calling this enduring courses right now, our alternative to AP. What have these calls been like over the first few months?

Sarah Novlan (11:39.107)
Yes.

Sarah Novlan (11:48.482)
Yeah, so I mean, it's interesting, because I think when you and I talked in Austin, there's an agreement and understanding and from many of the people that have already spoken to this conversation, a recognition that something has to happen with AP. And as I started having these calls with all different types of schools, I think I underestimated

how much of a demand there is for this. Every school that I've talked to, the reaction is finally, there's a solution on the horizon because many schools, whether they have completely issued any kind of dual credit or AP, or whether they have a robust amount of AP or dual credit offerings,

they realize that it's problematic and they want another solution. And so that's what I've seen on the K-12 and the college side. People feel beholden to one because of the brand recognition of AP or the college board and what parents that they want without maybe not necessarily understanding all of the realities and details of it.

Jeremy Tate (12:52.678)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Tate (13:06.117)
Yeah.

Sarah Novlan (13:14.766)
But also, you know, just because I think that there's a real, I think, desire for many schools to be able to in these terminal courses to retain the mission and vision for their school that they've been building up to and their scope and sequence. And sometimes they have to compromise on that in order to offer these classes.

Jeremy Tate (13:38.119)
So one of the things I had a suspicion of going into this was, of course, a lot of schools have felt this tension, right? If they get rid of AP, they're going to probably lose students. If they keep it, they're going to feel some kind of pull to compromise, especially when we talk about the humanities. But one of the things that I didn't realize was on the college side. And the colleges, they kind of know that AP is not serious.

Sarah Novlan (13:58.884)
Yes.

Jeremy Tate (14:04.702)
And, but because other colleges accepted as well, if they, if they stop accepting it for credit, they're probably going to lose students. And as we know right now, you know, colleges are very, they're hyper competitive for the kind of students coming out of places like Hill Country Christian School. and so that has been one of the real surprises and they have been enthusiastic. They have been saying, yes, we already work with IB and AP and we don't really like them. We like CLT and we would love to have something that actually

reflects what we're doing here if we're going to be giving college or university credit early. Is that what your conversations have been like as well?

Sarah Novlan (14:42.638)
Yes, absolutely. I mean, I hear that more than I anticipated from the colleges because I mean, I think there's two things. One is there's the, like you said, there's the competition for the students. So there needs to be a practical solution for that in enduring courses can solve that. But then there's also just like the very real, I think the reality that

When a student takes an AP class, does not mean, takes an AP class and does well on the AP test, it does not necessarily mean that they are ready for that college level coursework. And there's a dilution of the content and the rigor. so colleges have recognized that, but again, they feel beholden to accept it.

Jeremy Tate (15:31.013)
Yeah.

Well, this is what the craziest irony is from this whole thing, right? You've got schools like Veritas and Richmond that have held the line, no APs, and there's a number of other flagships, great schools, right? But what they've actually done in their junior, senior, core level classes is way more academically rigorous than what they're doing at most colleges and universities. And yet those students have then had to go to college and universities and take what feels like a remedial class that's basically a downfall

Sarah Novlan (15:40.781)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (16:02.076)
grade from what they took in high school simply because this mechanism has not already existed to basically call a spade a spade.

Sarah Novlan (16:09.806)
Yes. Yeah. And I think too, you know, it's so sad because, I have shared this with you before that there's a district not too far from me where a student could take an AP class and get away with not ever reading a full length novel. And it's crazy. And it's tragic because these students go through this pipeline, this AP pipeline, and they think on the other end of it, I don't like the humanities. I don't like English, but they haven't had a true engagement.

Jeremy Tate (16:24.026)
That's crazy.

Jeremy Tate (16:36.633)
Yeah.

Sarah Novlan (16:39.848)
with meaningful intellectual virtue with any kind of course material that promotes human flourishing. So they have this misperception about these areas of study because what's offered is just, it's diluted. In some cases, it's very empty and very transactional. And I think that CLT and during courses,

That's what we want. want courses, that have humanistic depth and breadth to them that invite back this appreciation for the intellectual virtues and connect students with what the humanities are truly about.

Jeremy Tate (17:23.59)
So I love for you to share this story. think this is maybe one of the things that kind of contributed to the fire that you have. mean, something you experienced in the classroom, seeing what AP was up to. I'm interested in hearing this story. The one that I love to cite myself is the one from AP Human Geography, where we love to occasionally just put that out on social platforms once again. be like, this is literally insane ideological indoctrination. This is the case where the AP Human Geography

Sarah Novlan (17:32.418)
Yes.

Jeremy Tate (17:53.884)
Give the kids two tables.

birth rates and death rates, and then they asked them to determine which country had made the most advances in female empowerment. And it was France, just because France had the lowest birth rate. So they were actually testing ideological conformity. That you had what I would describe as an anti-Christian, anti-Catholic view of the family, children, marriage, in order to get the question right. And that's pretty dark. And College Board took that down. When we exposed it, new, the CollegeFix and others picked it up, and College Board

apologize. They said it was mistake, right? But it was just a reflection of what they're actually about, I think. I'm interested in hearing this story, something you saw in your class.

Sarah Novlan (18:35.459)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, so, you know, my, my frustration with AP, I do want get to that story. My frustration kind of began a little bit earlier with not just is it the content problematic, but there's a, there's a problem with the rigor and that in just over the past decade of teaching it, as I would give my, used to give my students a prompt by Abigail Adams, nothing objectionable there.

great prompt, so much to pull from. And now what's coming out in terms of practice, it's harder because it's not as rich. There's really no value there. So there's that side. The second side, like you mentioned, is on the side of ideology and really what's being pushed to these students. so there's the dilution of material, but then there's also the content. And the first thing that happened was,

I was sent by some publishers, some AP textbooks, and the very first page that I happened to open the book to, I need to look at the actual picture, but it was point of view of the author, and it was my experience as a queer black man. And it was having the students analyze this speech, and it was...

I opened it, I took a picture of it and sent it to our head of school. And I said, what am I supposed to do with this? And then I walked over to the trash can and threw it away. Like I just threw the whole textbook away. I'm not going to use that. Right. I'm not even going to have that in my classroom. And then the second thing that really just caused me to think, I just can't do this anymore. Was I was, I had assigned some passages for practice from the AP classroom.

Jeremy Tate (20:14.15)
Yeah.

Sarah Novlan (20:34.195)
which is the digital database of multiple choice questions to draw from to my students. And then in the spring, this was right before we met in Austin. And what happened was all of them got one question wrong. And I went back and looked at why did they get the question wrong? And the passage basically was saying that there was a group of voters in a state

that were all white. And then the question was asking students to make the inference that because all of the voters were white, it's super surprising that they didn't vote as conservatives. So the inference is if you're white, you are automatically a conservative. And my students, of course, they all miss the question because they're not reading that inference. They're not understanding the bias that's being pushed on them. And so

Jeremy Tate (21:29.765)
Yeah.

Sarah Novlan (21:31.489)
I said, guys, I'm gonna throw this question out. It's ridiculous. And in my head, I was thinking, if it's ridiculous, if it's this ridiculous, why am I making this compromise? And if I'm making this compromise, then there's thousands of other teachers who are equally as passionate and convicted about what we're doing classical Christian education, who may be pushed to make the same compromise and somebody needs to do something about it.

Jeremy Tate (21:59.367)
I love that. I sometimes will say at CLT that testing is not just an evaluative tool, but that it is a pedagogical tool as well. The tests really do teach. And this can cut in two different directions. It can teach students false things about God, man, the church, the West, the human person, all this. But it can also teach true things. I remember when I was running an SAT prep company, one of the passages I would use, was 1920s in this very empowered working woman was engaged and she

very sad because it was going to be the end of

you know, her professional life. was just a very sad, negative view of marriage. And I thought, okay, let's not be afraid of ideas or passages, but like, could we also have a passage that talks about the paradox of the mystery of marriage? If you give your way, your life way to someone else and find happiness in doing that, like let's present, if we're going to do that, like let's present the full side. And I think what we're excited about doing at CLT is having a really clear vision for what we always understood as human flourishing and saying,

want to put students in front of these kind of texts to do that. And when we're talking about enduring courses, the question that folks come to us with right away is where do you start? There's 43. Is that right, Sarah? 43 AP classes? And I loved your insight here of let's maybe start. Well, I'll let you share it. Where to start and why.

Sarah Novlan (23:04.921)
Yes.

Sarah Novlan (23:14.349)
Yes, yes. Last time I checked.

Sarah Novlan (23:25.357)
Yeah, so we are starting in the humanities and I think the humanities are the most problematic for the reasons I shared, is one, the content. And again, I think that there's, I love the CLT author database because we want to be sharing and exposing our students to a variety of rich, good literature sources in the humanities and

I think that's where there's the most creep in terms of what AP is presenting. And so I think there's the content is one side, but I also think it warrants examination to ask ourselves to like, what's missing? Are there things that AP is not inviting students into that can enrich their experience of learning in an assessment that CLT can address?

that's just, it's not there in AP. And again, I go back to that word transactional, which is, you know, it's pass this test, get this credit, and it's formulaic. And so that's one reason we're starting in the humanities. I think also from our conversations with our pilot partners on the K-12 and the college side, that's where I think that...

there's the most demand. You see like the numbers of students who take AP exams and a lot of it is in the humanities. So our hope is to roll out a couple of those humanities based assessments every year and build from there.

Jeremy Tate (25:06.502)
I didn't prepare you that I was gonna ask this question, or I don't think many of the previous questions either, but something that's kind of a nightmare scenario to me. We've got on our plaque in our office, we're gonna completely dislodge a college board, be number one by 2040, we wanna replace this soul crushing educational empire with the tradition. But.

Sarah Novlan (25:09.432)
Okay.

Jeremy Tate (25:31.559)
The nightmare scenario is like then we displaced the college board and realized we're exactly like the college board, right? That's the nightmare scenario. know, the students that are trying to rack up the AP credits, they're not taking in time to grow and wonder. They're not taking in time to really relish these great literary texts.

They're just, I remember one of the best, amazing students I ever taught in terms of grades. I mean, this was a kid at at Brodnik High School and they could be taking a test and I'd put into Power Teacher a grade. like, this is how crazy it was. And this was 2013. She'd get a notification on her phone and want to say, Mr. Tate, why did I get a point off on this? talk to me. The girl had a 4.6, 99 in every class. I think she hated school. I don't think she had any actual love for learning.

almost at all. How do we create this new mechanism that's going to allow students to get the credits they ought and avoid creating something that pushes towards a wrong telos?

Sarah Novlan (26:37.901)
Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I just had a call with a partner school where he was sharing his students at their school, they're running on a treadmill, right? They're running at top speed, jockeying for these GPA points. And it's a narrative that even at, think, the best schools, the best, most centered schools that our parents and our students have bought into. And I think that,

This is one of the reasons why CLT is the right organization to be the driver of this in terms of what CLT stands for, right? Reconnecting the virtue and knowledge and that focus on truth, beauty and goodness. As we have these conversations with our partners on K-12 and college side, when we build these assessments to think through, let's start

with core values of what is the goal of an assessment? throw out college credit, throw out GPA. When we think about an assessment, what are we trying to do? We're trying to understand that student's level of mastery. Okay, well, what matters in mastery when we're thinking about what needs to be measured? And you've said this so many times, when we think about why a testing company?

Why a testing company instead of curriculum or something like that? And it's because testing drives in what happens in the classroom. So we have the opportunity here in creating an assessment, measuring what matters, throwing out the numbers and the competition and connecting as we are so many organizations who have the same goal of reclaiming education, of re-centering it.

to come up with, and I don't think we do it alone, to come up with something beautiful that we can put in front of students that then drives and drives down what you said. Like, let's let go of the rat race of the treadmill and invites a sense of wonder back into assessments. Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (28:56.954)
That's great. love that. One of my heroes, Sarah, Rich Meyer, who's on our academic board, he's going to miss the Annapolis Summit because he's running a marathon in all 50 states. He's got this very amazing goal. But I was with Rich, we were speaking at a Duke and Altam event together and Rich got up in front of all of these heads of schools and superintendents and priests and bishops. And he kind of just challenged folks with this question. He you know, what does it convey to our students when we bring in an external authority?

Sarah Novlan (29:01.006)
Yes.

Jeremy Tate (29:26.678)
that they process as an authority and they see that they don't, it's very obvious they don't believe what we believe. That it so powerfully undermines all of, so much of the hard work that happens day in, day out, year after year at the schools. I think it's often, and I think that's been one of my experiences with CLT is that,

Often people initially say, know, with the case of the CLT itself, that's a test. People take it two or three times a year and it's, what's really the big deal? And then when, you know, you think about it a bit more, a bit more, you say, wow. Like this is in many ways the guide, the, you know, academic authority that we're deferring to that doesn't believe in what we're doing. That doesn't even believe in the same telos or goal for what education is in the first place.

Sarah Novlan (30:11.843)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Tate (30:13.926)
Sarah Noglen, we are so excited to have you come out on full time at CLT in January. We always say at CLT, we don't even just have a better mission and vision than the college, we're an ACT, but we have a whole lot more fun and we think we throw better parties as well. So it's going to be great. Final question for you before you go. We love to end AnchorPod talking about books. If you could name one that has been most transformative for you, most formative, what would that be?

Sarah Novlan (30:19.151)
Yes.

Sarah Novlan (30:28.076)
You

Sarah Novlan (30:41.699)
I would have to say The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy. That is a book that I became acquainted with when I was a senior in college. And I returned to it year over year. And this is kind of a good example. I got to lead a group of seniors through that book last year.

And we ended it. So if you don't know the story, if you don't know the story, it's it's basically this very middle class Russian bureaucrat who spends his entire life running the rat race, sprinting on a treadmill. But come find out he's he's on the wrong ladder. He's on the wrong corporate ladder. And he he realizes at the end of his life as he's dying the slow, tragic death that he wasted it. And he didn't focus on

Jeremy Tate (31:20.582)
Hmm.

Sarah Novlan (31:35.907)
what matters. And it's just this really wonderful cautionary tale of making your life matter, of focusing on the important things. And I got to end the book last year with my seniors on my actual birthday and had this really great harkness discussion with them about what does it mean to go in the world and to live a life that matters. And so that is the book that I come back to year after year.

Jeremy Tate (31:56.123)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (32:04.568)
Awesome. Love it. Sarah Novelin, again, Chief Academic Officer at Hill Country Christian coming on at CLT in January. Sarah, you've done amazing work, amazing work at Hill Country and amazing work already working with enduring courses here at CLT. And yeah, it's going to be a fun few years. Thank you so much.

Sarah Novlan (32:23.469)
Thank you, Jeremy.