http://www.pe.com/localnews/inland/stories/PE_News_Local_S_books08.185a4141.html
Fighting in court for faith in class
LAWSUIT: A Murrieta Christian high school wants a judge to look at UC's
rejection of courses.
01:38 AM PST on Thursday, December 8, 2005
By JESSICA ZISKO / The Press-Enterprise
UC Court Case
Aug. 24, 2005: Attorneys for Calvary Chapel Christian School and the
Association of Christian Schools International file a lawsuit against the
University of California in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. The lawsuit,
filed on behalf of six Calvary students, alleges that the UC system
discriminates against students from Christian schools and violates their
free-speech rights because it does not accept several of their school's courses
for college admission credit.
Oct. 28: UC attorneys file a motion to dismiss the case. The university argues
that it has a right to set academic standards for admissions and is not
infringing on students' First Amendment rights because it does not stop the
school from teaching -- or students from studying -- topics with a religious
viewpoint.
Dec. 12: A federal judge in Los Angeles is scheduled to hear arguments on the
motion to dismiss.
In public schools, textbooks tell students that Roe vs. Wade gave women the
right to choose an abortion. Textbooks in some Christian schools say the
landmark Supreme Court case advanced the "slaughter" of the unborn.
Public school students read that Mark Twain was a great American author. Their
peers in some Christian schools also read about him, but as a man who rejected
his creator and was hopeless.
University of California officials say some lessons in Christian textbooks
don't meet their admissions standards. Their belief has led to a lawsuit that
pits the public university system against six students of a Murrieta Christian
school who say their religious views hurt their chances of being accepted for
enrollment by a UC campus.
The suit, scheduled for a hearing Monday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles,
centers on three classes offered at Calvary Chapel Christian School that UC
officials have refused to certify for admissions credit.
High school students who want to attend a UC campus must complete a sequence of
UC-approved college-preparatory courses. The lawsuit says the university system
discriminated against the Christian students by refusing to certify the
classes, therefore preventing them from taking the Calvary courses they want.
UC officials argue that they have a right to set admissions standards to ensure
that students are ready for college and say they consistently reject courses
from both public and private schools for not meeting those benchmarks.
The outcome of the court battle could have powerful ramifications for
admissions policies at other public universities because the 10-campus
University of California is considered a flagship system nationwide, experts
say.
"The UC is so important that other universities will follow what they do," said
Steven Roy Goodman, a Washington, D.C.-based educational consultant who has
advised college-bound students on applications for nearly two decades.
Christian-education advocates also are watching. They say a defeat for their
side could undermine the ability of Christian schools to teach their beliefs
because students would have less access to a UC education.
"There is a trend in higher education to eliminate God from everything," said
Robert Tyler, an attorney for the students.
None Has Yet Applied
The Calvary students, their school and the Association of Christian Schools
International filed the lawsuit.
None of the students has been rejected by the university. Two are seniors and
will apply to UC campuses this winter. The others are juniors and sophomores
who plan to apply.
Attorneys for the school have refused requests to let the students or their
families comment on the case.
The suit lists Cody Young as one of the Calvary students suing the UC system.
The senior plays on the varsity basketball team and has high test scores. He
hopes to study aerospace engineering at UC San Diego, according to the suit.
The lawsuit highlights a growing nationwide clash over what, and how, high
school students should learn before college.
In Pennsylvania, a judge is expected to rule by January on whether a school
district can teach intelligent design -- the theory that life is so complex
that the universe must have been created by an intelligent force -- alongside
evolution. In Kansas, the state Board of Education in November deleted the
teaching of evolution from the state's science curriculum.
Illustration Omitted:
"There was never a point in college where I felt ill-equipped," says
Jennifer Eastman, who graduated from Calvary Chapel Christian School in 2000
and then earned a degree in English at UC Riverside. Frank Bellino / The
Press-Enterprise
The Murrieta students' lawsuit goes beyond science. It also addresses one
literature and two history courses that UC officials have refused to certify,
identifying them and the textbooks they use as biased or contradictory to
knowledge "generally accepted" in the collegiate community, according to the
suit.
"They are citizens with a right to that education just as much as any student,"
said Ken Smitherman, president of the Association of Christian Schools
International. "Just because they chose private education should not eliminate
them."
UC officials say they have the authority to set academic benchmarks so students
can be successful later in life.
"There's no mandate that the schools are not allowed to teach these courses,"
UC attorney Christopher Patti said. "All the university is doing is setting
standards for what students need to know when they get here."
Patti said UC standards do not prevent students from taking religious classes
or cause them to forsake their Christian beliefs. Students who can't satisfy
academic requirements can be admitted to a UC campus on the basis of high
standardized-test scores, SAT II tests in certain subjects or special
exceptions.
More than 75 percent of the Calvary students who have applied to a UC campus
have been admitted on the basis of their classes, he said.
Jennifer Eastman enrolled at UC Riverside after graduating from Calvary Chapel
Christian School in 2000. After four years, Eastman left UCR with a bachelor's
degree in English and a 3.4 grade-point average -- all earned while working and
commuting from Murrieta.
She said her undergraduate courses were simple and attributes her college
success to Calvary's teachers and textbooks. Now 23, she works in sales for an
outdoor company in Temecula.
"There was never a point in college where I felt ill-equipped," Eastman said.
Overall, the UC system rejects about 15 percent of the roughly 1,000 courses a
year submitted for approval by public and private high schools, Patti said. The
rejections are based on reasons that range from class structure to the amount
of material studied.
He said the university has recognized 44 courses taught at the Christian
school. Some of them used Christian textbooks, although not as primary course
material, Patti said.
Troubled by Textbooks
The lawsuit contends that UC unfairly rejects classes taught from a Christian
"viewpoint" while approving other schools' courses on Buddhism, Judaism and
Islam.
UC officials say their concern lies with textbooks published by conservative
publishers Bob Jones University Press and ABeka Books that were used as the
main course material. They say the books lack information critical to a
student's success.
UC officials disapprove, for example, of science courses that use Bob Jones
University Press textbooks. The books question evolution and the scientific
method and acknowledge in an introduction that the authors tried to "put the
Word of God first and science second."
"You can't narrow inquiry to what agrees with a certain fundamental view of the
world filtered through a certain kind of fundamental lens," said Kevin Padian,
biology professor and curator of the Museum of Paleontology at UC Berkeley.
Padian testified for plaintiffs in the Pennsylvania case.
The rejected history classes also used Bob Jones University textbooks. Patti
said some course material contradicts historical knowledge and emphasizes
"divine intervention in historical events."
One textbook, "United States History for Christian Schools," calls Mormonism a
"cult" and says some women may have practiced witchcraft at the time of the
Salem witch trials. Bob Jones University officials declined to say how its
authors are chosen or who approves the text.
Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and
State, said Calvary should not be immune to admissions standards because it
incorporates religion in the classroom.
"If they want to teach the Salem witch trials were getting a bad rap, they can
do that," he said. But he added that UC has a right to say the education does
not prepare students for college.
Americans United is a private organization based in Washington, D.C.
However, Tyler, the school's lawyer, said Calvary's classes might do a better
job of preparing students for higher education than the classes at public
schools do. The history textbooks delve deeper into such issues as slavery and
American life and are written more eloquently, he said.
And science textbooks don't hide evolution, he said, adding that students must
understand it to defend their beliefs.
Goodman, the education consultant, said UC officials shortchange Calvary
students. Students may learn a different version of history and science but are
capable of understanding different perspectives, he said.
"If the university really believes in a free flow of ideas, let's go ahead and
let ideas be debated," Goodman said.
© 2005, The Press-Enterprise Company
* * *
http://www.economist.com/world/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5300912
A new front in the culture wars
The Lord's word
Dec 14th 2005 | LOS ANGELES
>From The Economist print edition
Are secular universities discriminating against religious schools? Or are they
just setting high standards?
IN ITS opening pages, "Biology for Christian Schools" (Bob Jones University
Press) comes straight to the point:
"The people who have prepared this book have tried consistently to put the Word
of God first and science second. To the best of the author's knowledge, the
conclusions drawn from observable facts that are presented in this book agree
with the Scriptures. If a mistake has been made (which is probable since this
book was prepared by humans) and at any point God's Word is not put first, the
author apologises."
And that is precisely why a high-school science course using the 693-page book
as a primary text does not meet the admission standards of the University of
California (UC). It does not, argues the university, reflect "knowledge
generally accepted in the scientific and educational communities and with which
a student at the university level should be conversant." The same, says the
university, is true of some other courses-in history, literature and
government-offered by Calvary Chapel Christian Schools of Murrieta, a small
town south-east of Los Angeles. These courses also rely on books from the Bob
Jones University Press and from another Christian publisher, A Beka Books.
Welcome to the latest front in America's culture wars. The Association of
Christian Schools International (ACSI), the Calvary Chapel Schools and six
Calvary Chapel students are suing the university, whose campuses include that
traditional bastion of liberal thought, Berkeley, as well as the huge UCLA
campus, for what they call "viewpoint discrimination". The Christian schools
add that the university is violating the students' constitutional right to
freedom of speech and religion. The university naturally denies the charges,
and this week a federal judge in Los Angeles began considering the preliminary
arguments of a contest which could eventually reach the Supreme Court.
So far the UC case has had less publicity than the argument about whether high
schools can teach "intelligent design" as an alternative to evolution
(currently being fought out in a courtroom in Pennsylvania) or even a ferocious
dispute up in Cupertino, where a history teacher claims he was restrained from
teaching about Christianity's role in American history (parents had complained
that he was acting more like an evangelical preacher). In fact, all these
arguments are part of the same battleground, which pits an increasingly
self-confident evangelical America against a secular education establishment.
The ACSI, which represents almost 4,000 Christian high schools in America,
including some 800 in California, worries that if the Christians' challenge
fails, UC's intolerance might spread to other institutions and other states.
Moreover, says a lawyer for the plaintiffs, victory would be "a major blow to
the arrogance of the ivory towers and their attempt to say that kids from
Christian schools can't be well prepared for university."
There is a lot at stake. California, with its ten-campus UC system and the
23-campus California State network, has America's biggest-and best-system of
public universities. The case has arisen because of the way that UC, unlike
other systems, intrudes into high-school education. Its Board of Admissions and
Relations with Schools assesses high-school courses to see if they meet its
standards (known as "A-G requirements", and ranging from a two-year history
syllabus to one-year elective courses in subjects such as the visual and
performing arts).
UC denies it practices secular intolerance and "viewpoint discrimination". It
notes that it has approved plenty of courses at Christian schools and in the
past four years has accepted 24 of the 32 applicants from the Murrieta school.
And it says that if the courses had used these textbooks "as supplementary,
rather than primary, texts, it is likely they would have been approved."
What is really being challenged, says the university, is its right to set its
own academic standards and admission requirements. In which case the question
is what that right implies. The Christian plaintiffs say they have no objection
to science students, for example, being taught conventional wisdom, but "their
constitutional rights are abridged or discriminated against when they are told
that the current interpretation of scientific method must be taught
dogmatically, and must be accepted by students, to be eligible for admission to
University of California institutions." In other words, what the case involves
is not so much the now-familiar tussle over intelligent design, but a student's
freedom of speech and thought.
All of which, counters the university, is bogus. As long as they satisfy the
A-G requirements, students who are headed into the UC system can believe
whatever they choose to and take whatever additional courses-including
religious ones-they like. In any case, the university's lawyers point out,
there is plenty of precedent establishing a university's right to control a
student's speech: witness a court ruling three years ago that a UC student did
not have a first amendment right to write "fuck you" to university
administrators in his master's thesis.
In theory, the UC case stops at California's borders: no other state's public
universities interfere so much in the high-school system, so their "secular
intolerance", real or imagined, is less potent. In practice, whatever happens
in the current case, more such conflicts will follow.
For instance, when home-schooled children or students from private Christian
schools apply to a public university, they are typically judged by their
examination scores-and, typically, they are required to perform much better
than their counterparts from the public schools. By the reckoning of the
Calvary Chapel plaintiffs, a student from a Christian school in California
needs to score within the top 2-4%, whereas a public-school teenager with good
course-work could meet the required score almost by guesswork.
Given the growth across America in both home-schooling and Christian schooling,
there will surely be more "viewpoint-discriminated" students and their parents
contacting their lawyers. And evangelical America will keep pushing. Christian
universities such as Wheaton, in Illinois, are proof that decent scholarship
can co-exist with evangelical faith; and, given the rise of born-again
Christianity across the nation, more evangelical scholars are now found in
secular faculties.
Fifty years ago there were only a handful of "megachurches", drawing more than
2,000 each Sunday; today, there are more than 1,200 such churches, three of
them with congregations of over 20,000. Not only is the nation's president a
born-again Christian, but so (according to the Pew Research Centre) are 54% of
America's Protestants, who are 30% of the population.
Will America's public universities take on a similar tinge? To the extent that
educational establishments reflect cultural reality, it may be inevitable.
After all, before the liberal era of the 1960s, there were no such things as
courses in "Women's Studies" or "African-American Studies". Now, no prudent
American university would be without them. It would be odd if conservative
Christians did not leave similar footprints on the syllabus.
Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2005. All rights reserved.
* * *
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-uc20dec20,0,1819133.story?coll=la-news-comment-editorials
EDITORIAL
Failing the science test
December 20, 2005
STUDENTS WHO HEAD OFF TO COLLEGE knowing nothing about evolution except that
they shouldn't believe in it, and thinking that dinosaurs and people lived
together, are not ready for university-level science courses. That is why the
University of California is justified in rejecting a Christian school's
creationism-based science course as college-prep material.
The course relies on textbooks that openly say they put religion before
science. Yet Calvary Chapel Christian School in Murietta, along with a
nationwide group of Christian schools, filed suit against the UC system,
seeking to force its approval of this and other courses that baldly lack the
required academic muscle.
One of the textbooks used for the course, published by Bob Jones University
Press, teaches that the world is no more than 10,000 years old. The other,
titled "Biology: God's Living Creation," has a 40-page section about evolution,
all of it an effort to debunk Darwin's theory while ignoring or denying a
century of scientific discovery. Dinosaurs lived alongside people, it claims,
and might have gone extinct in the Noah-era flood. How to account for evidence
that shows they died off millions of years ago? You just can't trust
scientists' dating techniques, the book informs youngsters.
It's one thing to supplement the teaching of science in private schools with
religious beliefs, or to give arguments against evolution as well as for it.
It's another to leave teenagers ignorant of the most basic scientific knowledge
and still declare them fit for entry into a top mainstream university.
The school also claims that UC rejected its literature course, "Christianity
and Morality in American Literature," because the university is biased against
Christians. UC says it rejected the course because it taught solely from an
anthology using excerpts of texts instead of the complete original texts that
UC demands from all literature courses.
The six students in whose names the suit is filed are supposedly shocked that
these courses aren't accepted by UC. But it's up to parents and students to
pick coursework, both in private and public schools, that meets the
requirements for UC admissions. People can teach and learn what they want on
their own dime, but that doesn't give them the right to push publicly supported
schools into doing the same.
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
*** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is
distributed, without profit, for research and educational purposes only. ***
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