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subscriptions Jordan Trivison is a very active participant in Shannon Jonker's 12th-grade English class. On one recent morning Jordan recapped in detail several chapters of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which the students had been assigned to read the previous night. When the other seniors at Calvary Chapel high school in Murietta, California, joined in the discussion, the class moved quickly from the question of whether the monster in the novel can be blamed for his behavior--since he was abandoned shortly after his formation, and no one taught him right from wrong--to the more complex issue of "whether the monster has a soul." Jordan struggled with this issue, noting that, on the one hand, the monster was created by man, and not God, but, on the other hand, he was capable of love and compassion. The discussion, encompassing as it did such explicitly religious ideas, might not have taken place in a typical high-school classroom, but Jordan is for all intents and purposes a typical high-school student. He has California blond hair, sports a well-worn Eagles T-shirt, is active in student government and his church, and says that he rarely gets to bed before midnight because of homework. Looking to the future, he hopes to attend the nearby University of California at Riverside (to be close to his family and save money), where he plans to major in business and political science. Eventually, he wants to become a stockbroker and then run for Congress. As much as Jordan likes the evangelical atmosphere at Calvary, he doesn't think a Christian college campus would challenge him in the same way as UC, for example. "I want to be in a setting where I can stand up for what I believe in and not back down," he says. "If I want to be a politician someday, I'll have to start somewhere." Jordan is already getting a sense of just how hard he will have to fight to reach his goals. His high school is now engaged in a battle over whether students who attend Christian high schools will be given the same opportunity as their public school counterparts to attend California's state universities. A year and a half ago, Calvary approached the University of California's Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools with the curricula of some new courses it wanted to offer. The board must ensure that the classes given in California's high schools are sufficiently rigorous to be counted in UC admissions decisions. Calvary submitted three courses for approval in the areas of history/social science and English/literature. It also made inquiries about curricula it wanted to offer in the natural sciences and religion/ethics, in an effort to clarify the board's policies. In the end, the three courses were officially rejected, and the remainder would have been if they had been submitted. The decision was a slap in the face to Calvary, which prided itself on educating kids in religious and secular knowledge, but the school didn't turn the other cheek. And because the University of California action was perceived by many religious educators as a possible precedent for action elsewhere, Calvary was joined in its suit by the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI), an umbrella group for four thousand Christian education institutions. Calvary Chapel Christian School resembles an academically average high school with a little more order and discipline. Rejection on Grounds of Religion The science classes from Calvary were rejected by the UC with a simple form letter, one apparently sent to all schools that proposed to use Christian high-school science textbooks published by the two biggest Christian publishers, A Beka Book and Bob Jones University. "The content of the course outlines submitted for approval is not consistent with the viewpoints and knowledge generally accepted in the scientific community," said the letter. "As such, students who take these courses may not be well prepared for success if/when they enter science courses/programs at UC."
Evolution, intelligent design, and creationism are all presented in the Christian biology books. But even if the last two were left out, UC still wouldn't be satisfied. According to Burt Carney, ACSI's legal-affairs director, in a meeting held after the rejection of the textbooks, Barbara Sawrey, a professor of chemistry at UC San Diego, explained that there was nothing wrong scientifically with the proposed physics textbook. She simply objected to its including a verse from scripture at the beginning of each chapter. While controversy over the science requirements turned this lawsuit into another story about evolution and intelligent design for many in the media, the case is, in fact, about much more. The college also objected to one of Calvary's history courses, "Christianity's Influence on America," because, as the UC letter said, the focus was "too narrow/too specialized" and because it is "not consistent with the empirical historical knowledge generally accepted in the collegiate community." The curriculum of the course seems broad enough--covering the role of Christianity in the founding, the abolitionist movement, civil rights, the fall of communism--but it seems downright all-encompassing when compared, as it was in the complaint, with approved classes like "Modern Irish History" and "Armenian History." Calvary's literature class, "Christian Morality in American Literature," was rejected because it "does not offer a non-biased approach to the subject matter." But, as Calvary and ACSI pointed out, the UC approved courses such as "Feminine Perspectives in Literature" and "Ethnic Experiences in Literature." UC counsel Patti would later try to clarify the rejection by saying that the Calvary course relied solely on works from an anthology. Never mind that the anthology included works by Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman. Ultimately, Patti argues that it is irrelevant whether the UC rejects such courses since other entry methods are available to the Calvary students. UC, he explains, will admit students who score at a certain level on standardized tests, and they may also be admitted by "exception." Calvary students would thus have to perform in the top 4 percent on exams like the SATII (being in the top 15 percent usually gets you into one of the university campuses). Admission by "exception" is used mostly for home schoolers. "Exception" was made for only eight students in the entire system last year. At Whitefield Academy, the faculty is determined to bring faith into every aspect of the curriculum. At the same time, it wants its students to succeed in the secular world. A UC statement explains that the school's requirements are there to ensure "that students coming to the University are conversant with accepted educational and scientific content and methods of inquiry at the level required for UC students and typically expected of educated citizens in the competitive workforce." But Patti acknowledges that there is no evidence that students admitted from schools using these textbooks or offering these courses are performing any differently from their peers in secular high schools. Indeed, juniors at ACSI schools performed between 8 and 27 percentage points above average on the Stanford 10 subject tests in the 2004-05 school year (see Figure 1). Though UC's rules aren't affecting a great number of students right now, because they apply only if a school submits proposals for new curricula, ACSI's Burt Carney believes it is only a matter of time before the university goes after the 150 or so schools in California that already offer these classes. "Right now, ACSI has distinctively religious schools, which have endeavored to integrate faith and learning in all the subjects," Carney explains. "If California prevails, the only way for students to go from our schools to university would be to strip out the religious elements of their education." Indeed, a list of "helpful hints" from the university suggests stripping religion even out of the religion classes: "Religion and ethics courses are acceptable ...
primary goals the personal religious growth of the student." T...
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