Law provides little protection for schoolteachers who express their beliefs
Legal analysts say a Chicago appeals court ruling in January was probably less important as a precedent than as a stark reminder that the law provides little protection for schoolteachers who express their beliefs. When Bloomington, Indiana, elementary school teacher Deborah Mayer complained to federal courts that she had been fired for telling her students, "I honk for peace" and that this violated her free-speech rights, the courts replied, essentially, that as a public school teacher she didn't have any. Eight months earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had decided in a case involving the Los Angeles district attorney's office that government employees were not protected by the First Amendment when they faced discipline for speaking at work about controversies related to their jobs. The Chicago appeals court was the first to apply the same rationale to the classroom, an issue that the Supreme Court expressly left unresolved.
A recent case from a Los Angeles charter school offers more evidence of the limits teachers face in choosing curricula or seeking redress of grievances. The school's administrators forbade seventh-graders from reading aloud at a February assembly the award-winning poem "A Wreath for Emmett Till," about a black teenager beaten to death by white men in 1955. In an online guide to teaching the poem in grades seven and up, publisher Houghton Mifflin recommends telling students that it will be disturbing; administrators said they feared it would be too much for the kindergartners in the audience and then explained that Till's alleged whistle at a white woman was inappropriate. When social studies teacher Marisol Alba and a colleague signed letters of protest written by students at the largely African American school, both teachers were fired.
Vikram Amar, a professor at the University of California’s Hasting College of Law notes that that as far as the courts are concerned "public education is inherently a situation where the government is the speaker, and…its employees are the mouthpieces of the government." Whatever academic freedom that exists for college teachers it is "much, much less" for teachers in the public school K-12 setting. The Mayer ruling was disappointing but not surprising, says Michael Simpson, assistant general counsel of the National Education Association (NEA), the nation's largest teachers' union. For the last decade, he said, federal courts "have not been receptive to arguments that teachers, both K-12 and higher education, have free-speech rights in the classroom." On the other hand, says Francisco Negrón, lawyer for the National School Boards Association, if teachers were free to express their viewpoints in class, school boards would be less able to do their job of determining the curriculum and complying with government demands for accountability. Mr. Amar and others say the Mayer ruling could be influential elsewhere because there are few appellate decisions on the issue, and because the author, Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook, is a prominent conservative jurist. Mr. Simpson says the ruling, though within the legal mainstream, is bad for education because teachers are not "hired to read a script." The case might interest the Supreme Court, and the NEA will probably file a brief in support of Mayer's appeal should the justices take the case, he says.
San Francisco Chronicle
By Bob Egelko
[Full Story]
[Editor’s Note: The circuit court decision referred to is the Seventh Circuit’s in Mayer v. Monroe County Community School Corporation, 474 F.3d 477 (7th Cir. 2007) and that of the Supreme Court is Garcetti v. Ceballos, 126 S. Ct. 1951 (2006). The Legal Clips summary of the former, with a link to the summary of the latter, is below. NSBA’s brief to the Seventh Circuit in Mayer, also available from that link, argued that a close reading of Garcetti reveals that what the Supreme Court "expressly left unresolved" in fact was how the decision would apply in the higher education context, in which legal principles of academic freedom are at issue. See also the link to another recent circuit court decision involving a teacher’s lawsuit over free speech.]
[NSBA School Law pages on Mayer v. Monroe County Cmty. Sch. Corp.]
[NSBA School Law pages on Lee v. York County Sch. Div.]