Strange standards

Education | The University of California system is trying to force Christian schools to use the same textbooks that lower-scoring public-school students use. An association of Christian schools is fighting back | Lynn Vincent

MURIETTA, Calif.— It's a mid-October test day in Hao Tiet's physics classroom at Calvary Chapel Christian School (CCCS) in Murietta. Ubiquitous southern California sunshine beams through the windows as his 12 students, most clad in board shorts and flip-flops, weigh in on whether they're ready.

"Let's do this," says one boy, whipping his bangs out of his eyes with an expert jerk of the chin.

"Let's not do this," says another boy in a brown surf-logo hoody. "Let's delay!"

Some students watch carefully as Mr. Tiet sketches dry-erase vectors on a whiteboard and calls out review questions on Newton's First Law of Motion. Others scour their textbook, Prentice Hall's Conceptual Physics (2002), willing last-minute scraps of data to cling to their brains.