JESUS IN THE CLASSROOM.(schooling in Cupertino)

Cupertino, California, is situated at the edge of the Santa Cruz Mountains below San Francisco Bay, sloping eastward into the flatlands of the Santa Clara Valley, more familiarly known as Silicon Valley. The city, which covers roughly eleven square miles, has no downtown, no discernible boundaries, and few physical features that distinguish its broad boulevards and strip malls from those of its neighboring communities, such as Sunnyvale. Cupertino is home to Apple Computer, Inc., and several other high-tech firms, but the town's greatest distinction, its deepest source of civic pride, is its public school system.

Last year, the Cupertino Union School District attained a score of 919 out of a possible 1,000 on the state's Academic Performance Index, and one of its elementary schools achieved a perfect rating. Cupertino has two of the state's top three middle and elementary schools, and two of its high schools have been ranked among the nation's best.

House hunters in the Silicon Valley carefully study school-district maps before making a purchase offer, and for many acquiring a Cupertino address is an important factor in planning their families. The address comes at a premium, with houses bearing an average price of nearly a million dollars. The homes are not especially grand, tending toward a "Brady Bunch" subdivision architectural style, but even when the high-tech stock crash devastated portfolios Cupertino home values increased at double-digit rates (thirty-eight per cent in the past year). "It's absolutely the schools, no question," says Maria Segal, a local real-estate agent, and a parent of three Cupertino students. "It means a difference of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars over comparable houses in other locations."

The success of Cupertino's schools is partly a function of demography. In most families, at least one parent works in the high-tech industry. Those children who struggle in school (apparently few) are likely to find volunteer tutoring help from a class mother who holds a Ph.D. Cupertino is proudly diverse (the school district's Web site boasts of a student body "representing forty-five different languages"), although it is diversity of a particular sort. The town's population, of fifty thousand, is roughly half white and half Asian, with very few Hispanics and fewer than five hundred African-Americans. The city has almost no low-income housing. The parents of Cupertino's schoolchildren tend to be well-paid strivers (earning a median income of a hundred thousand dollars) with a profound faith in the deterministic power of education. The Cupertino Courier, the local weekly, has reported that some immigrants from China and India migrate to the Bay Area strategically, with the aim of working their way up to Cupertino in time for their kids to enroll in middle school. "You get a lot of pressure to have the children do well," Sarah Beetem, a fifth-grade teacher, says. "That's partly because these parents have had to do well in their home countries in order to get the jobs that allowed them to come to the U.S. They were at the top of their classes all along. They believe in hard work. I never have problems with kids not doing their homework."

Cupertino is a town that, more than most places, measures its prosperity, both civil and individual, by the state of its schools. That is why the community was so deeply struck when, late last fall, Cupertino's schools attracted national attention of an unwelcome sort. In November, a fifth-grade teacher named Stephen Williams brought a federal civil-rights claim against his school's principal and the Cupertino Union School District, asserting that he had been discriminated against because he is a Christian. Williams said that he had been stopped from distributing historical documents to his students because the documents mentioned God.

News of the lawsuit broke during Thanksgiving week, as the city's schools were beginning the long holiday weekend. Larry Woodard, a computer-networking executive who has a child at Stevens Creek Elementary in Cupertino, learned of the suit on Thanksgiving Eve, when he opened his laptop computer and visited his home Web page, the Drudge Report. Its headline declared: "declaration of independence banned at california school!"

Woodard was not surprised. He considers himself a social conservative, and he was always reading about some new outrage in the public schools, often just forty miles up the freeway. "I'm used to seeing things like this--you know, kids are being prohibited from learning about Christianity as it relates to our history," he recalls. "Just look at the students in San Francisco, or Berkeley, where kids are being forced to go live the week in a burka but they're not allowed to learn about the basic foundation of our nation." Woodard opened the Drudge link to a Reuters dispatch, and was dismayed to read that the town that had "banned" the Declaration was Cupertino and that the school involved was Stevens Creek Elementary. Woodard thought there had to be some mistake. He and his wife had found their home in Cupertino by handing their real-estate agent a school-district map showing the school's boundaries, and saying, "Those are your parameters." As a volunteer at the school, and a member of the Parent-Teacher Organization, Woodard had been impressed, discerning at Stevens Creek "none of this P.C. baloney that is so common in schools."