Unaccredited
Posted on July 25, 2008 at 3:11 pmCalvin Rye accuses the TNGOP of whipping religious folk up into a frenzy by telling people that the state had declared that cops with diplomas from church-related schools were ineligible for employment:
If that were true, every police officer who attended a Catholic school would have a sure-fire lawsuit against the State — and the ACLU would be first in line to help them out.
But it’s not true. The TNGOP left out a critical word. It should read, “diplomas from UNACCREDITED schools.” Without it, the sentence is a lie.
Instead, the TNGOP intentionally left out the most important word and added in a few completely irrelevant words — “home” and “church-related.” Why? To manipulate you, of course. To bait you. To fool you into outrage over a completely manufactured controversy.
I don’t care if you want to go to unaccredited high school or not. Knock yourself out. But if you do, you’re going to need a GED to be a cop. Your religion has nothing to do with it.
UPDATE: Bill Hobbs responds:
Calvin Rye misrepresents or maybe just misunderstand what we said. We didn’t say “religious schools.” We said “church-related” schools, which is not an :irrelevant: phrase as he asserts but is, in fact, the state Board of Education’s description of what it calls “Category IV Schools.”
It is students from those schools whose diplomas are being invalidated by bureaucratic fiat.
And Category IV schools ARE accredited.
T.C.A. §49-50-801 defines a church related school as “a school operated by denominational, parochial or other bona fide church organizations, which are required to meet the standards of accreditation or membership of the Tennessee Association of Christian Schools, the Tennessee Association of Independent Schools, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, the Tennessee Association of Non-Public Academic Schools, or a school affiliated with Accelerated Christian Education, Inc.”
Rye is just flat wrong.
