a “secondary school” is a high school. the issue is not about transferring credit from a christian college to the UC; it is about christian high schools wanting freedom to design their own curriculum and then getting bragging rights about how many of their students are later admitted to UC.

the christian high schools want it both ways … as do many parents …

Plaintiffs waived the viewpoint discrimination claim because the attorney said, explicitly, “we’re not going to argue animus,” which is the term the judge in this case used to refer to viewpoint discrimination.

Fail.

Here, it seems to me, there’s no infringement of the freedom of speech, or of ‘political viewpoints’, to use the term Ames used. If ‘standards of excellence’ are ‘content-neutral’, then it’s just a law like any other and only needs to make a minimal amount of sense to be found constitutional.

What I’m confused about is how the plaintiffs ‘accidentally waived’ their right to try to argue for viewpoint discrimination. Regardless, it looks like, whatever the merits, the plaintiffs were apparently not even arguing that a constitutional right had been violated, so strict scrutiny wouldn’t have come into it.

Reading through the judgement, one of the things that comes out is that in fact they don’t just refuse to recognize the classes, they actually send the schools feedback on how to improve them. So for example in the case of the Government module Ames mentions above, they sent a letter to the school asking for clarification of certain issues (like why they couldn’t find any record of the textbook), but the school failed to respond, something which made them look a bit ridiculous in court.

The point I’m making is, there’s a dialogue between the university and the schools, backed up by the law, so we can’t slide too far that way. On the other side, the restrictions the university imposes aren’t really about measuring the quality of the modules – they can’t really do that – but making sure that they cover the basics. I don’t think they’re going to suddenly start throwing out schools because the lecturer is a dull prick, for example.

(Actually I may blog this myself with a more in-depth look at the content of the statement latter, i.e. to add some technical play-by-play to Ames’ excellent colour).